


Happily Ever After Girl

by My_Barbaric_Yawp



Series: The Long Way Home [3]
Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: Adalind thinks a lot, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Fairy Tale Endings, Falling In Love, Family, Family Feels, Nick doesn't think nearly enough, Post-Canon, Season/Series 04, Season/Series 05, Season/Series 06, They love each other anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:00:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 38,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26725555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/My_Barbaric_Yawp/pseuds/My_Barbaric_Yawp
Summary: "The father's not a prince, then?" Henrietta asks, amusement embedded deep in her voice, and Adalind starts to laugh with an edge of hysteria.Because no, he's not a prince. Not at all.Adalind's POV of seasons 4-6. This story is a companion to my other stories: Siege Warfare and On Purpose.
Relationships: Nick Burkhardt/Adalind Schade
Series: The Long Way Home [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1254695
Comments: 52
Kudos: 192





	1. Chapter 1

_Once upon a time, there was a young prince who fell in love with a witch…_

***

Listen, baiting Juliette wasn't her best idea. It wasn't even her second best idea. There was just something about the woman. Maybe it was her stupid pretty hair—or those long, flawless legs—or maybe just the general air about her that suggested butter wouldn’t dare melt in her mouth and thereby sully her pristine reputation. Maybe it was all of that.

Adalind knew her own power in the looks department. It was a weapon—like anything else—and an effective one, too. In her experience, men never really bothered to listen to pretty women, which was annoying in the boardroom, but it also made them vulnerable when it counted. Just look at her track record. She hadn't had an alliance worth a damn since her mother kicked her out, but she was alive and still fighting because one man after another looked at her bright blue eyes under her pretty blonde hair and decided she wasn't worth worrying about. It was another kind of magic, and she used it accordingly.

But looks aside, there was something about the sheer saintly perfection of Juliette—the Martha Stewart-level homemaker and the professional animal saviour and the sickeningly loving and lovable girlfriend—something about all of that just made Adalind feel itchy and irritable all over.

And that was before she helped steal Adalind’s baby.

So Adalind wasn’t feeling great before she went to Nick and Juliette’s house, and she’s feeling even worse now, with a bruised rib and a cut brow and a throat raw from screaming in her car because damn it all to hell, now Juliette is a hexenbiest, too.

As if the woman didn’t already have it all.

Adalind needs to move—she knows that. Nick will be home eventually, and whether or not he's up to full Grimm strength, he’ll still have his gun, and Adalind is not feeling up to stopping bullets just now. She needs to leave, and she needs to go somewhere where no one is going to ask any stupid questions like “Hey, are you bleeding?” or “Hey, why do you look like you’ve been thrown into a wall?”

_Or, hey, did you pick a fight with a girl just because she has almost everything you want in life, including information that could lead you to your daughter, and then it turned out she’s a badass hexenbiest now, and she kicked the crap out of you for threatening her and maybe taunting her about screwing her boyfriend? Just a little?_

Yeah. That. Although, in her defense, the sex was good. Like maybe worth getting beat up by Juliette good. The revenge factor helped. And hey, if Nick was dating hexenbiests now—

But no. That would never happen. He would always be Juliette’s, and even if he wasn’t, he would never be Adalind’s, so what did it matter? All that matters now is defending herself from Juliette, and for that, she knows just the guy.

***

Sean Renard might actually be her least favorite Royal. Well, maybe that’s a stretch. By all accounts, the Queen was actually a huge pain in the ass when she was alive, and Eric could be a real dick when he wanted to be. Viktor is a sadistic bitch, but he can be managed—they all can really—

But then there’s Sean. The original Royal in her life, and the father of her baby. Her first real love and her last real chance at another life. A life of security and safety, and maybe even love, eventually, in some twisted way. A life that never would have been hers, really, because he never actually wanted her. Not in any way that matters.

But he wants Diana, hopefully, and so does Adalind. Sitting in his car, pleading for his help, Adalind wants her baby back with every part of her being.

She wants to survive to see Diana grow up and become the miracle she was meant to be. Without her parents, Diana might become anything. Well, not anything. She has too much power to be anything but a miracle or a monster. All that power bottled up in a little girl with no one to teach her how not to use it? It could go horrifically wrong. Adalind’s a little sick to her stomach just thinking about it.

“She needs us,” she tells Sean, “now more than ever.”

But he’s not taking her seriously, the dick, and Adalind’s starting to feel a little caged in with all of her circling enemies—Viktor, the resistance, Nick and his newly superpowered girlfriend, who Sean seems to know all about.

“She had nowhere else to turn,” Sean says—explaining how he’s been helping poor, defenseless Juliette—the same defenseless Juliette who almost put Adalind through a wall last night—and Adalind gets that sick feeling in her stomach again. What is it about Juliette that has the men in her orbit tripping over themselves to lend her a hand and a shoulder to cry on and a port in any storm?

Meanwhile, Adalind’s over here, port-less in Portland for the third time.

It’s galling, is what it is. It’s absolutely maddening.

But there is one more person she hasn’t talked to yet—well, one person she wants to talk to, anyway. She can’t imagine Nick would be too happy to see her right now, and if he’s a Grimm again…

Well, she likes her head where it is. Like, attached, you know?

So she’s not going to see Nick, but it is time to visit the next stop on the hexenbiest tour of Portland. It’s time to go see Henrietta.

***

The thing about Henrietta is that she’s a hexenbiest. She’s useful and all—honestly one of the best, although the bar for decent hexenbiests tends to be pretty low—but ultimately she doesn’t pick sides, and she can’t quite be trusted. She's an equal opportunity witch, and she didn’t get to this point of comfort in her life by betting on the underdog.

To win Henrietta's help, Adalind knows that she has to show that she’s in control, so she charges into the house like a woman on a mission. She’s good at this—at pretending that she holds all the cards while in truth, she’s always playing 52 pick-up. That was something they taught her in law school—always make the opposing counsel believe you know exactly what you're doing, even when the case is held together by nothing more than spit and prayer, and Adalind had excelled. She might have gotten away with it this time, too, if Henrietta didn’t have extraordinary senses that most hexenbiests would kill for.

“Congratulations,” Henrietta says—all calm and self-satisfied—and it takes the wind right out of Adalind’s sails because she’s lost in this conversation now, and that is not a safe place to be. Not when Juliette’s out there showing power it should have taken her years to master.

“Oh my,” Henrietta purrs, really enjoying herself now. “You really don’t know.” She’s stroking Adalind’s hair, muttering, “Definitely…” to herself, and _this right here_ , Adalind thinks, _is why people have such a problem with witches_.

“Definitely what?” Adalind asks, properly annoyed now as well as scared and pissed off, and when the answer finally comes, it’s so much worse than she expected.

Henrietta draws out each word of the next sentence with the kind of chaotic satisfaction that gives even fairly sane hexenbiests a bad name:

"You are going to have another baby."

"That's impossible,” Adalind says. It’s a gut reaction. She’s been alone in the world for so long now. “I haven't been with anyone."

"Well, you must have been with someone. You didn't do this by yourself."

And Adalind stops. It's not that she's forgotten the last time she slept with someone. She's never going to forget the way Nick took her apart with his hands and mouth and...everything else, before he put her back together with the best damn orgasm of her life.

But since that afternoon in his bed, she's been through Royal torture cells, hostile royal negotiations, and one bitch of a fight with Juliette. And through all of it—the panic and the pain and the fighting for her life—the time she spent with Nick has become something of a fantasy in her memory. Something beautiful and hot and completely unreal to think about in the fleeting moments of alone time afforded to the mother of the most wanted child in the world.

Sometimes she doesn't even think about the sex. Sometimes she just remembers the way he looked at her when she was Juliette—like she was a dream and gift and his—and it's enough to get her off and make her heart ache at the same time. Sometimes she can still hear the things he said that day—whispered right in her ear like a siren song—

_"Fuck, yes."_

_"If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me."_

_"I love you."_

That last one's the real kicker.

"No," Adalind tells Henrietta, and it's visceral. Adamant. "No, no, no, no!" This cannot be happening. Not again. Not now.

Except there's another part of her—a slight swelling under her hands on her stomach and a niggling thought in the back of her mind—that's saying: of course.

Of. Fucking. Course. You execute one perfectly hot revenge fuck, and here you are, knocked up by the Grimm you've been trying to fuck over since you saw his freaky dead eyes outside of that stupidly expensive coffee shop five years ago.

It was the perfect plan. Fuck the Grimm and hey, presto! No more Grimm. Only she got carried away and forgot that the same mechanics that would take his powers might also give her something of his. Like a fucked up Yankee swap.

"The father's not a prince, then?" Henrietta asks, amusement embedded deep in her voice, and Adalind starts to laugh with an edge of hysteria.

Because no, he's not a prince. Not at all.

***

_Once upon a time, there was a young prince who fell in love with a witch…_

How many times had her mother told her the story? Too many times. Way too many.

_She was beautiful and demure and refined. She was so well-behaved that he almost forgot that she was a witch. He loved her so much, he gave her a child._

Was that love? Adalind was zero for two on love based conception at this point. And they said fairytales were harmless...

_By this time the prince had become a King, and his Queen hated the witch because the child she bore was better, stronger, and more handsome than any of his half-brothers could hope to be._

Sean Renard. Prince fucking Charming.

_And there was a prophecy. This prince—half witch, half royal—would found a new dynasty destined to usher in a fresh Renaissance and restore witches to their rightful place in the world._

Namely—from Catherine Schade's perspective—running it. _Dear old Mom_. Say what you liked about her—and Adalind had said plenty—the woman had never set her sights any lower than lofty.

Regardless, at this point Sean is no closer to the throne than he was five years ago, despite her mother and Adalind herself being so dickmatized that they'd gone to war with the deadliest Grimm in centuries to aid his claim. That had gone well.

But if Sean was the prince in this story, then Nick Burkhardt was the kingdom's freaking executioner. He was dangerous and axe happy and a bit of a dick, what with the power snatching and the wicked mouth, and oh dear lord, the baby stealing—

 _Diana_. How was she not the first thing on the list? Only she can’t be, not right now—

Because now Adalind's having the baby stealer’s baby.

Some fucking fairytale.

***

How she gets back to the hotel is anyone's guess. She might have flown there on a broomstick if that were a thing, but it's not, so who knows? Henrietta, maybe? A taxi? Maybe she even drove herself, but she can’t remember, so if she did, that wasn’t a good choice.

Not that there are any good choices, in this situation. She's staring at three positive pregnancy tests, and she also can't quite figure out where those came from. Other than the double lines, of course, which are all Nick's.

Nick.

Well, that's not going to work. Not if she ever wants to see Diana again. And besides, Nick hates her.

"I'm going to have to find you another father," she says, out loud to convince herself, because this might just be her craziest scheme yet, and she once made a blood pact with an honest-to-god gypsy.

But even at the edge of her panic, she can sense her protective instincts kicking in. She may not have access to her mom's books right now or to Nick's treasure trove of Grimm lore, but she'd bet anything that a Grimm and a hexenbiest have never stopped trying to kill each other long enough to make a baby before. And that means that her second child is just as rare as the first, which can't be a good thing.

“Viktor,” she says. It’ll have to be Viktor. He’s a skeezy asshole, of course, but he’s a Royal and with any luck, one of his cousins will kill him soon enough, and then she’ll be sitting pretty as the mother of two of the King’s grandchildren with a life of tantalizing court intrigue ahead of her. She’s about sick of princes, anyway.

Only when she leaves her room, she runs right into the King. He’s so sweet sometimes she almost forgets he’s a ruthless old bastard. She remembers quickly enough when he tells her that he’s shipping Viktor out and swapping Kenneth in. She’s never met Kenneth, but she’s heard things. Bad things, which is really saying something in this fucked up family.

It’s not that she doesn’t consider trying to seduce the King and convincing him to accept the paternity of Nick’s baby. She’s Adalind goddamn Schade, and she’s never left a viable option on the table unconsidered. But on further reflection, she decides that the King is an even worse bet than Viktor. When he dies—and someone will get rid of him soon enough; patricide never gets old with the Royals—his successor will want to clean house of all the King's bastards who might pose a threat to the consolidation of power.

Diana can probably defend herself—what with the levitation and the violet eyes and the, you know, world threatening level of power that’s put her at the top of every power-hungry despot’s wishlist since before she was born.

Diana will be fine. It hurts to say that—her baby is two in actual earth years, and she’s on her own out there in the world—but it’s true nonetheless. Diana can protect herself, but her new baby brother is going to need a better insurance policy.

But when Kenneth arrives, all of Adalind’s scheming grinds to a screeching halt. How many Royals have she run circles around in the past five years? So, so many. It would almost be funny how many if she hadn't managed to lose her daughter in the process. But now it's all for nothing because Kenneth is impossible.

He doesn't seem to like blondes for one thing, which is real pain. He can see through her lies for another, which she takes as a personal affront since she spent three grueling years in law school perfecting that particular skill into an art form. And worst of all—unholy of all unholies—

He doesn't think she's powerful enough to be worth making a deal with.

Which is hard to argue with while she's hunched over the toilet bowl, throwing up bile and the one bit of toast she managed to nibble at before the morning sickness caught up. But still. No one gets to count Adalind Schade out of a fight. Not even when she feels like shit.

***

You don't survive three Royal regime changes and umpteen hexenbiest contract negotiations without learning how to use what you have to your advantage.

What she has is a baby. So...who wants him?

Well, her, of course. It's a little painful, actually, just how much she wants him. She can almost feel him in there, swimming around and growing slowly. She can almost feel him in her arms—all soft cheeks and fresh, warm baby smell—the one she never got to get used to with Diana. She's scared now. More scared than she's ever been. If she loses this one, too…

She can almost see his deep grey eyes blinking up at her—vulnerable and depending on her—right before they turn pitch black, just like his father’s. Two little Grimm death eyes staring up at her with absolute love and absolute trust, counting on her to keep him safe until her little baby Grimm is all grown up and beheading his own monsters.

That should probably be more alarming than it is. Right now, she’s looking forward to it.

She supposes that the King should be on the list of people who might want her child. She might be able to buy enough time to figure something else out before he gets ushered out of this mortal coil by one of his more ambitious heirs. Even without the veneer of Royal blood, the King is a collector at heart. He'd fight for them just to see how a Grimm-hexenbiest baby turned out, with the added bonus of finally getting a Burkhardt on the payroll in twenty years time, give or take a decade.

It’s not a long term solution, though, and Adalind wonders absently how many more bait-and-switches the Royals are going to let her pull before they just kill her to get it over with. Kenneth certainly seems to have no patience to offer.

Maybe not the Royals, then.

Sean?

No. Just...no.

Nick? Or...

Adalind takes a breath, and she wonders not for the first time where Kelly Burkhardt is. The woman has one of Adalind's babies already—maybe she'd take the set and let Adalind tag along? Adalind had liked Kelly, the last time they met—before she stole Diana and ran off without a trace, anyway.

So Kelly might be an option, but later. Once she's out of this mess and able to convince Kelly that she means her no harm. That could take a while.

Which in the short term leaves, well, Nick.

Her...baby daddy.

There's a flutter of panic somewhere behind her navel, and she thinks, _it's okay, baby, he's not that scary_.

He's just a Grimm. Just a Grimm who hates her and her family and everything she stands for, and probably the fact that this baby exists to boot.

That's understandable, really. Baby Burkhardt wasn't exactly on her wish list, either. And she knows instinctively, deep in her gut that Nick is going to be a great dad. He’ll be protective on instinct, and he’ll tear this city apart and maybe even Adalind herself to keep their son safe.

How does she know it’s a boy? How did Henrietta know she was pregnant? Sometimes a witch just knows.

So, Nick is an option to consider, finally, now that she has something he might want. And Adalind does trust him, in some strange and twisted way. He's tried to kill her for years, and he's stolen her baby, and he kissed her so hard once that she had to bite him and draw blood, which made her lose all her powers. He’s also saved her life more times than really should be possible for two mortal enemies. He’s saved her daughter’s life, too, even though his solution left a lot to be desired. He's the start of so many of her stories, and he’s the end of them, too.

She thinks about him in the sunshine years ago, outside of that dumb hipster coffee shop. She’d had it all, then—a high-paying job, a wardrobe to kill for, and a Royal bastard maybe-boyfriend who didn't entirely suck in bed, whatever his personality flaws.

And then she'd seen Nick Burkhardt. All dark, shaggy hair and crazy intense eyes and laughing—honest-to-God laughing in the sunshine like a kid. It must have been Hank he was laughing at, the rational half of her brain supplies, but at the time she hadn't noticed. She'd been too busy looking at young Nick in all his loose and carefree glory. He was glorious.

She hasn't seen Nick laugh much since then, and neither has she. They really did a number on each other, didn't they? She wonders, just for a moment, what would have happened if she hadn't woged then, in the sunlight outside of the coffee shop. What might have happened if she'd just keep smiling at the cute cop in front of her and maybe slipped him her number, just to see where it went? Would they have a baby in that world, too?

Yes, she thinks. She has no clue why. A witch just knows.

There still would have been Juliette, though. Adalind would still have been a hexenbiest. Nick would always be a Grimm.

Some things don't change, and all of their problems were written in that first glance.

So she needs to bring him more than a baby. She needs to bring him something to make up for the fact of herself. Something that can help him with Juliette, maybe. And she needs to find that something quick, before anything else about this situation gets out of hand.

***

Of course, then Juliette tries to kill her with a freaking gargoyle, and Adalind has to hand it to her. As assassination attempts go, Juliette got closer than most.

And that’s going to be a real problem, because Kenneth doesn’t seem to give a damn. He’s too busy trying to figure out how to turn Juliette to his cause—to convince her to go against Nick. Which is crazy, but then so is Juliette right now.

This is your brain. This is your brain on superpowered hexenbiest mojo that shows up unexpectedly in your thirties. It had to be crazy-making, which Adalind might even feel bad about if, you know, Juliette wasn’t trying to kill her and her baby.

A wave of fear flows up her spine. The baby.

Does Juliette even know about the baby?

_Juliette can never know about the baby._

“It’s surprising how quickly betrayal becomes a viable option, given the right circumstances,” Kenneth says, all smug and pleased with himself. He knows. He’s not an idiot, and he’s done the math, and he knows that the baby she’s carrying now is all Nick’s.

That wave of fear crashes down at the base of her skull, and she can barely breathe, much less speak. Kenneth isn’t listening to her anyway. He’s never listened to her, and now he knows, so there’s no reason to.

“The real question is, what would Juliette do if she finds out that you and Nick are having a love child?”

And that’s it, really. That’s the moment she knows she’s going to have to face Nick and introduce him to the baby currently kicking away at her bladder, as if she didn’t have enough reasons to want to pee her pants right now. He’s Nick Burkhardt’s kid all right. Already pressing all her buttons.

And she loves him for it.

Hopefully his father feels the same way.

***

She comes up with a plan in the taxi to the precinct. It’s amazing what a shot of adrenaline will do for your problem solving faculties, and her mind is flying through every single thing she’s ever learned as a witch to find something that might appeal to a Grimm with a newly minted hexenbiest girlfriend.

There’s no cure—Henrietta had been quite firm, and, in the early days of her power loss, Adalind had done plenty of research on the implications of her blood tie with Nick. Since Nick’s blood had taken her powers once, she is now immune from all Grimm blood forever, which is pretty handy, all considered. Not so much when it comes to Juliette, who must have gotten her new powers from Adalind in the same way Adalind took Nick’s powers originally.

It’s a little weird, in retrospect, to think that Nick has actually slept with her body. He’s seen her naked—and yes, that’s technically normal for two people who’ve had sex—but it still feels oddly intimate to Adalind. He’s seen all of her, in all her glory. His hands know her shape. Did he like watching her come apart for him? Did he think of Adalind herself while he was fucking Juliette?

_He better have._

But enough of that. Her mind is racing and so is the meter. They’ll be at the precinct before she knows it. So…

How do you solve a problem like Juliette?

_Suppressant._

It’s the only way. Her great-aunt had made her memorize the recipe in high school when her mom had really gone off the deep end for the first time. It’s almost fitting that it will need to be her mother’s corpse that fuels the potion for Juliette.

But the potion alone wouldn’t be enough. How could Adalind get Nick to trust it? It would need to be tested, and there’s only one other hexenbiest to try it on.

Adalind rubs her stomach with a shudder, contemplating life without her powers again. It’s not as scary as the last time. The last time it had been absolutely world ending, but she had rallied. She had survived. That’s who Adalind Schade is: a goddamn survivor.

And yeah, she might have to depend on Nick’s honor and his interest in his baby to protect her for a while, but in the time she’s known him, she has seen him do some unbelievably stupid things in the name of honor and fair-play. He’s a killer, sure, but he’s a noble one. Maybe he’s not the executioner, like she thought. Maybe he’s actually a knight.

_Couldn’t be worse than the actual Prince..._

"That is not mine,” Sean says the moment she shows him her bump, and Adalind rolls her eyes.

No shit, Sean. Sometimes she wonders what she ever saw in this man.

But Nick's equally quick to deny her:

"Are you crazy?” he says. He’s almost laughing at the absurdity of the situation, and it might be cute if it wasn’t actually happening to her. “That's impossible."

"Impossible?” Adalind says, feeling her lips curve into the wryest of smiles. “Don't I wish."

What follows is the one of the toughest conversations of her life. She's digging deep for all of her training about difficult conversations and ruthless negotiations, but none of it really works until the baby kicks hard, and she has to stop to take it in.

There were no quiet moments in her pregnancy with Diana. No time to rest and enjoy the strangeness of a tiny foot pressing into her hand through her skin. He's kicking up a storm right now. Maybe it's her own elevated heart rate that has him so excited, or maybe it's Nick's voice, warm and familiar even in his anger and distress.

Nick is watching her. It's cagey, sure. He doesn't want to look at her at all, but he can't look away now. There's something important happening here in the silence. Some kind of bond is knotting it's way around them all. Mother. Baby.

Father.

_Family._

In the quiet, Adalind moves forward. Nick tries to shy away, but for the first time since she met him, she's finally in control. She takes his hand—even as he fights her—and she brings it to her belly, right over her navel.

His hand is warm and strong—battle ready, but still soft where it presses against their son's overactive foot. After a moment she doesn't even need to hold it there. He's too focused on the movement under her skin to let go.

She lets herself watch him like this. He really is beautiful, even when he's angry. Maybe especially when he's angry. He looks all...Grimm. Maybe she's actually into that, just a little.

Maybe a lot.

Regardless, she's going to be stuck with this man in her life for the next eighteen years, so he might as well be nice to look at. Nicer than Sean, anyway, who's watching them like a hawk and cataloging every potential weakness for some future use. It's a real shame Sean Renard is going to be a part of this pregnancy story, too. Princes really do get around.

But Adalind can tell that Nick is barely aware of Sean right now. Nick is barely breathing. All his energy is focused on the tiny life underneath his palm.

"I'm going to have our baby, Nick," she says, and he looks up to meet her eyes with a steady gaze for the first time since he walked into the room. His eyes are calmer now. Fierce and bright. Ready for a fight.

"There's only one person who can stop me," she tells him. All that energy coiled up inside of him needs to go somewhere, and it’d better be Juliette.

He's not happy about the reminder, but he's willing to take her to Rosalee at least, even if he is walking out of the precinct so fast she has to shuffle a little in her heels to keep up.

_Why did she wear heels for this?_

She knows why. She always wore heels to court. They make her feel like a boss bitch, and the power of that before the bench cannot be overestimated. She'd figured she would need all of her armor with Nick. It's almost annoying that all she really needed was a bit of quiet and one soft moment over their baby's foot.

But even that won't be enough to save her when they finally get to the hall, and Nick pulls up short.

A moment later Adalind spots the problem.

_Juliette._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It turns out that the character of Adalind Schade means an awful lot to me personally. She's a bitch, and I think that's amazing. She cares deeply about what she loves, and she never stops fighting for it. She grows up a lot during the run of the show, but she never stops being herself: a snarky know-it-all with a heart of gold and zero qualms about squashing her enemies like bugs.
> 
> I often think she's the answer to some of the age old questions: What if Cordelia Chase got to live and get everything she wanted? What if Spike, but a girl? What if the villains we loved got to grow up and be true to themselves and still get the love they deserve?
> 
> I think we need more bitches on TV, out there getting their happy endings. I hope you enjoy this in depth look at Adalind getting hers. This story is longer than my masters’ thesis. It’s going to be a multi-chapter fic, and I already have a lot of it written. Thanks for reading and coming on this journey.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for all your feedback so far! I hope you like the next installment.

_Once upon a time, there was a powerful witch who really hated her ex-boyfriend’s new baby mama..._

***

Juliette is not happy.

_Well, that’s an understatement._

Juliette is in a murderous rage.

And Adalind gets it. She really does. Being a hexenbiest puts you in touch with power and rage in equal measure. Magic has always been the weapon of the oppressed. In its most essential form, it’s a survival mechanism—and what a legacy of oppression gets you is a lot of primal, vital anger. It’s a powerful place to pull energy from, and any good witch knows how to tap into that anger to fuel the change she needs to see in the world.

But every great witch also has to reckon with that anger—to learn how to control it. To learn how to set it aside. To learn how to work magic sparked by joy and sorrow and the whole gamut of human emotion, because at the end of the day what unending anger gets you is utter self-destruction.

The problem is that Juliette is too new to the power to know this. There’s a reason most hexenbiests start to slowly reveal their powers as teenagers. It takes time to learn how to control this stuff. It takes time to learn how to control yourself. Being gifted fully-fledged and supercharged powers overnight in your thirties?

Not ideal.

And it’s really not ideal when you’re housing a baby that said brand-new hexenbiest would be angry about even at the best of times. And this is definitely not the best of times.

So now Juliette is on the warpath, and Nick is blocking her way, and Adalind is feeling a little woozy—what with the fighting and the heels and the baby doing what feels like martial arts in her stomach. Adalind steadies herself with a touch to Nick’s back—warm, strong, and steady under her palm—which only pisses Juliette off even more.

“Let me tell you what I‘m going to do,” Juliette says. “I’m going to rip this little bitch’s throat out.”

“You are in a police station,” Nick says—like that’s the real problem here—and Juliette doesn’t give a damn.

“I am in hell, Nick, and it’s time she went there with me.”

Which...okay. Except Adalind has been in hell pretty much since she met Nick, so really, Juliette is just catching up.

_So not the point._

The point is Juliette makes a move to get past Nick and reach Adalind, and Nick stops her. Puts his hand on her arm and pushes her back, like a goddamn hero, and Adalind starts to see Juliette’s point. If you had this—if you were used to Nick protecting you—how pissed would you be if he started protecting someone else, instead?

And in that moment, Adalind is more afraid than ever before. She’s been under Nick’s protection for all of seven minutes, and already she’s feeling all warm and fuzzy about it. Imagine what Juliette must be missing. That cannot be good.

“You’re choosing her over me?” Juliette demands.

“That is not what I’m doing,” Nick says, but it’s a lie, and they all know it. He may be choosing to protect Adalind for a chance to help Juliette control her powers, but more importantly, he’s choosing to protect their child, and that’s an ironclad bond that’s not going anywhere any time soon.

“Everything okay here, Nick?” It’s Wu, and Adalind is happier to see him than she ever thought possible.

“Yeah,” Nick says, “we’re just working something out.”

“We’re not working anything out,” Adalind says, because men are so dumb sometimes, and she’s not afraid to ask for help when a crazy hexenbiest is breathing down her neck. “She needs to leave.”

And Juliette does leave, eventually, with a power-stare and a not-so-thinly veiled threat.

“What the hell was that?” Adalind says, leaning in to yell-whisper in Nick’s ear. “‘ _We’re just working something out._ ’ She wants to kill me. There is nothing to work out!”

“She’s in there somewhere,” Nick says. His eyes are closed, and he’s pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s trying to find some inner strength to draw on in this mad situation. “She’s not like this. She’s not this person. If I can just get to the real Juliette—”

“Nick, this is the real Juliette,” Adalind says. “This is the realest Juliette has ever been. Becoming a hexenbiest doesn’t give you a new personality—it amps up the personality you already have. All your flaws and weaknesses get magnified. Your id gets a steroid injection. She hated me before she was a hexenbiest. She hates me even more now, and she’s got the power to do something about it. And that would be one thing, but she hates our baby, too, and that’s dangerous, Nick. That’s too dangerous for you to get mushy about how nice your girlfriend used to be.”

Nick’s eyes are open now, and he’s staring at Adalind like he’s never seen her before.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Just— you said _our_ baby. I just—”

“Oh.”

“It’s just—fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“How did this happen?” he asks, looking genuinely baffled, and it’s a cute look even if he is spiraling a little.

“I mean do you want to talk about the condom we didn’t use or—”

“No! I mean—I don’t know what I mean. I didn’t want to have a baby with you!”

“Yeah, me either!” Adalind says, back to the whisper-yelling because that sort of stung even though it’s perfectly understandable that he would feel that way.

“I’m not the one who tricked you into bed though!” He’s also whisper-yelling, and now they’re both yelling at each other in hushed tones in the middle of the hall.

“I thought it would help me get Diana back!”

“That doesn’t make it better!”

“Ah, Nick?” It’s Wu again. They both swing apart to glare at him, and he has to take a step back with his hands raised to hold them off. “I just wanted to say, people are starting to notice the whisper fight over here. Maybe you want to get out of the precinct and, I don’t know, fight in the comfort of your own car?”

“Fine!” Nick says, and Adalind can’t help the little giggle that slips out of her throat, because he sounds like a moody teenager, and she’s never seen this side of him before.

She thinks she might kind of like it.

***

They don’t resume their fight in the car. Something about being able to speak at full volume just lets the air out of their tires, and they spend most of the ride in stony silence.

Adalind makes one earnest attempt to defuse the tension between them.

"Listen, I know you don't want to hear this from me right now, but I am sorry. For tricking you into bed, and removing your powers and, you know, getting pregnant. Only I can't quite be sorry for that last one, because Nick, this kid is incredible. He's such a fighter. He's got to be, and I love him already. I hope someday you can, too."

Nick doesn't say anything to that, and it's a long, silent ride to the spice shop. Somehow Adalind forgot just how well this man can brood, but now he's giving her a full on masterclass. Well, she can take a hint, so she sits back, closes her eyes and tries not to think about how hungry she is. And sore and worried and just plain exhausted. This growing a baby thing is no joke.

Eventually, they reach the spice shop, and Adalind lets herself rest for a moment in the still car before even thinking about opening her eyes.

"You awake?" He's not concerned, just annoyed, and Adalind nods before sitting up with a wince.

"What's wrong?" he asks, and Adalind almost laughs.

She's pregnant and homeless and almost out of options. She's risking everything on one potion with no margin for error, and the man she’s relying on for protection can't even meet her eyes the majority of the time.

_What isn't wrong?_

"I'm just sore and hungry. There wasn't a lot of time for breakfast, what with the running from the Royals and your crazy girlfriend."

"She's not crazy. She just needs help. She's not like you."

_Ouch._

"I know," Adalind says with a sigh. "I know she's a better person, and she saves puppies for a living, and she's totally rocking that new brunette hair. You don't have to rub it in, Nick."

"No, I mean she doesn't have your skills and your training. She's not prepared to control her powers the way you do."

Adalind opens her eyes and finds him watching her calmly for once, gaze steady.

"Nicholas Burkhardt, was that a compliment?"

He snorts, and maybe it's a little warmer than derisive. "It was an observation. Your choices have been terrible usually, but you've always had the control to make them. Juliette doesn't. She's not making active choices; she's just reacting. Violently."

"Yeah,” Adalind says. “That's what hexenbiest mothers are for. Mine wasn't the greatest, but she did the most important thing. She taught me how not to use magic. That's the real trick. Otherwise you can go power-mad and spell-happy pretty damn quick."

"Like Juliette."

"Yeah. And like Diana. Nick, I really hope your mother knows how to raise a hexenbiest."

Nick looks away then, and Adalind sighs again. It was nice while it lasted.

"She's a good mom," Nick says, still looking out the window. "Or she was before she had to fake her death, anyway. I know she loves Diana, but I also know that it's not the same as the way you love her. I am sorry, Adalind. I don't know what else we could have done."

"You could have fucking asked me," Adalind says, feeling hot rage wash over her all over again. "You could have let me go with her and your mother. We could have raised her together in the back of Juliette's station wagon in godforsaken Kentucky for all I care so long as my daughter was safe, and I got to be there."

Nick bows his head, but Adalind's not finished.

"I could have done that, you know. I could have run away with our baby, and you might never have known about him. Or you might have heard about him later and wondered desperately what he looked like. What he smelled like. What his first word was. When he took his first step. You could have had a son you never got to meet, and that still would have been less painful than getting to hold him for one terrifying but hopeful week before he was ripped out of your arms and sent away where you can't follow. I'm a bitch, Nick, and I've done some horrible things in my life. But I'm not stealing your baby right now, and in that regard, I'm not sure sorry is ever going to cut it."

She gets out of the car then and takes a deep breath of fresh air on the sidewalk. If she could leave Portland in that exact moment, she just might. But she can't. She's playing her last card, and like it or not, she has to play for keeps.

Nick can't meet her eyes when he gets out of the car, and Adalind doesn't even care this time. It's time to go see Rosalee, and then go dig up her mother.

***

"Oh my god," Rosalee says, staring at Adalind as she follows Nick into the back of the shop.

"That won't be the last," Nick says.

"I thought you never wanted to see her again—oh my god!"

That oh-my-god is for the belly Adalind is showing off. It's easier, really, just to flash the bump and get it over with, although she can't help wondering, if Nick had never wanted to see her again, had there been a time when he did? Right around Monroe and Rosalee's wedding, perhaps?

And hey, isn't that interesting? She still cares whether he missed her after the sex, even though she's also pissed at him right now, the dick. Life truly is a rich, rich tapestry.

"Who's the sperm donor this time?" Rosalee asks, and Adalind thinks that's a little harsh, but Nick is already leaning in to explain quietly:

"It happened while she was Juliette."

Rosalee is shocked, and she sinks back into her chair almost involuntarily.

"I...I think I might explode."

Adalind's about to offer to help her do just that, but there's too much ground to cover, and she really does need Rosalee's help to make this plan work.

Doesn't mean she can't twist the knife a little, though.

"Look, I'm well aware of your help in kidnapping Diana, so...nobody's perfect."

The point hits its mark. Rosalee looks properly chastened, but Nick barely gives Adalind time to enjoy it before he's off on yet another revealing train of thought.

"Look, if Adalind knows how to help Juliette, then we have to help her do it. Or at least, I have to help her do it, or you just may never want to see me again."

He's desperate to get sweet, human Juliette back, and that makes sense. But there's another edge to his words, and if Adalind isn't losing her spidey senses already, he's also feeling guilty enough to want to help make things right for her.

_What a prince._

No—wait—nevermind.

He's not a prince, and she's not a princess waiting to be rescued. They’re both just two storybook monsters who made a baby together by accident.

But Rosalee has the book they need and her mother's hat, so Adalind steps up to the bench ready to take charge of the potion and, with any luck, her runaway life in the process.

***

Nick gets called away almost immediately, and Adalind is starting to realize why he needs a team to keep up with the wesen population of Portland. The man needs to be everywhere, all the time and all at once. Adalind suddenly feels pretty lucky that he was actually at the station when she walked in. She would have hated to have to camp out in Sean’s office for any longer than necessary.

Working with Rosalee is surprisingly easy. Rosalee has an encyclopedic knowledge of herbs and a strong working appreciation for what her mother would have called “low magic”—practical charms that anyone could use if they set their mind to it and followed the book. Adalind and Rosalee spend the afternoon gathering supplies and hunting through her mother’s grimoire for more information to make sure this magical endeavor is a success.

It’s dark outside before they’re pretty much ready to go. All they’re missing is her mother’s body, and they have to wait until Sean can get the paperwork in order to move forward with the exhumation. In the quiet that follows the pause in their preparations, Rosalee starts to shift in her chair, looking uncomfortable and just a touch miserable.

"So," Rosalee says finally, "sorry."

It’s such a simple word, and it’s well intentioned, but Adalind is running on fumes at this point and low simmering anger, and it's there immediately when she reaches for it.

"Sorry for what exactly? Calling me a whore or stealing my baby?"

To her credit, Rosalee doesn't flinch. She’s not squirming now; she’s still and her eyes are calm and clear.

"Both," she says. "All of it. You came to us for help, and we betrayed you. That's on us, and it's on me. I'm sorry, Adalind, for what we did. I think it was necessary to protect your child, but that doesn't make it right, either."

The thing is, Adalind believes her. There's a shadow behind Rosalee's eyes now—a darkness that Adalind recognizes. One that she sees every day in the mirror. A loss so big that it changes you. A past so wild that it haunts you. All of a sudden, Adalind's not angry anymore, she's just bone weary.

"It's okay," she says. "I mean of course it's not okay, you know? But it is kind of. I know she's safe with Kelly. I know she can defend herself against anyone. And I know that this baby will be safer with you, Nick, and Monroe in his life. He's going to need all of us to make it through this, and right now, I'm glad to have the help."

"You definitely have that,” Rosalee says. “I might be a little slow to trust, but Nick needs all the help he can get. And he deserves a chance to be a dad, if that's what you both decide."

"Oh, he's a dad,” Adalind says--a little rueful while she rubs her sore and swollen stomach. “I'm not running off with this baby any time soon. He's kind of stuck with us for now."

"Okay.” Rosalee is smiling softly. It’s not much, but it’s something and out of nowhere Adalind thinks, _this could be the start of a beautiful friendship_.

Which is nuts. Adalind doesn’t have friends. She has allies, and enemies, and—rarely enough—lovers. She also hasn’t seen Casablanca in ten years, so where that line came from is anyone’s guess. But she likes Rosalee. She’s always liked Rosalee—baby stealing complicity aside—and right now it just feels like a real treat not to have to be on guard every second in front of another person.

“I'm going to make some tea,” Rosalee says. “Will you have some? I've got some that's great for the baby."

Six hours ago Adalind would have refused anything she hadn't prepared herself. Five hours ago she was alone in the world. Now she has tea and Rosalee, and it feels almost...nice.

***

The peace of tea is broken by an influx of menfolk bearing charred books and singed weapons. They all reek of smoke, and Adalind’s a little nauseous at the smell.

“What’s all that?” Rosalee asks.

“Stuff from the trailer,” Monroe says, already heading out the door for more.

“What happened to the trailer?”

“Juliette,” Nick says, like it explains everything, and in a way it does.

“She torched it,” Wu says.

“Oh my god,” Rosalee says.

Adalind is way beyond that.

“If she did that to the trailer, what’s she going to do to me?”

“You mean besides kill you?” That’s Hank. She hasn’t seen Hank in a while. He doesn’t look thrilled to see her, and she can’t really blame him.

“We need to get you someplace safe,” Nick says to Adalind. “You can’t stay here tonight.”

There’s some back and forth about finding a place Juliette won’t think to look before they reach a solution, and then Nick is leading Adalind out to his car.

Nick is too hyped up on the ride to brood. He’s muttering about Juliette, and Adalind lets him.

“I can’t believe she would destroy the trailer,” he says finally, hitting the wheel with his palm. “She knows how important that stuff is!”

Adalind rolls her eyes, hidden in the dark. Of course Juliette knows how important the trailer is. That’s why she burned it. Change the locks and hide your valuables. That's like rule number one of the bad breakup handbook, and that's not even taking into account the fact that Nick’s ex is a batshit hexenbiest on a mega power trip.

It does make Adalind wonder though—when was the last time Nick went through a break up? College? The academy? Just how long has he been with Juliette? Forever?

Well, that would explain a lot, but it mystifies a few other things.

Like who the hell taught him to be that good in bed?

 _Maybe no one did._ Maybe he was just a natural. Maybe they both were when they were together.

No, scratch that. Let that thought go.

_Moving swiftly on._

So Juliette burned Marie Kessler’s trailer. Everyone in Nick’s group is capital-S Shocked, and Adalind is beginning to realize that these people are too nice for their own good.

What they need is a healthy dose of skepticism and a group intervention with a realist. What they need is a born and bred hexenbiest, and having a lawyer around probably wouldn't hurt. What they need is Adalind Schade.

Adalind tries to push that thought away over the course of the trip to somewhere they rather worryingly referred to as ‘Bud's place.’ Adalind's pretty sure she's never met a Bud, and she's equally sure she never intended to.

It's also a little annoying to realize that there are still some secrets in Nick's operation that she knows nothing about. It's all starting to feel a little bit like dating in college. She remembers what it was like going out with Branden McCormick in sophomore year. He was the lacrosse star, of all things, and his lacrosse buddies and their girlfriends were this closed off little group with their own indsde jokes and completely impossible to follow politics. Joining their circle had been impossible even before her mother found out and made Adalind dump him. Branden hadn't been a prince, after all, and her mother had plans no kehrseite could ever hope to compete with.

But accidentally joining Nick's merry band is starting to feel a little bit like dating Branden. It's not just Nick she has to deal with, it's the whole packaged deal. Rosalee and Monroe. Hank and Wu. Sean, to some extent, and now this mysterious Bud. It's uncomfortable to be the new girl in the group, and that's before even remembering that she's managed to sleep with about half of them.

But what's even stranger is that she's starting to see the outline of an Adalind-shaped hole in the group just waiting for her to step into it. It makes sense, sort of. Nick's always had a girlfriend, and with Juliette off the deep end and sinking farther by the second, that position is slowly opening up. And she is having his baby. That's as close to a girlfriend as they're going to get any time soon.

And they need her, too. They haven't realized it yet, but it's actually amazing how far they've come relying on Rosalee's folk magic alone. Imagine what they could do with the things Adalind has stored inside her head. Imagine operation Grimm 2.0, now complete with hexenbiest lore.

Adalind has always loved a good power vacuum, and this one is a doozy. It's alluring, really, and also completely insane.

She only told Nick about the baby seven hours ago, and now she's contemplating a future with his crew of Royal busting, Resistance resisting, justice loving weirdos. When she thinks of the years she's spent running around the globe, fighting this man and everyone else who popped up along the way…

She's exhausted just thinking about it. Her life is freaking a farce. It's like one of those sick fairytales, where the quest takes forever and a day, and in the end you arrive where you began and know it all over again.

It's bullshit, is what it is. Her whole life for the last five years has been bullshit.

Well, except for Diana. And baby Grimm. And honestly, Nick right now is not looking so bad, either. He doesn't trust her, and he's unnervingly silent most of the time, but he doesn't seem to care if she's snarky to him one moment and fragile the next. He's annoyed with her plenty, but Adalind thinks he's also starting to find her straightforward responses to their shared problems a little amusing. And after years of balancing her existence on a knife's edge, it's honestly refreshing to just stop all that teetering and finally be herself.

She's spent five long years stroking princely egos and surviving Royal whims by pretending to be just dumb enough to be underestimated, and she's sick of it. She's sick of pretending to be less so that the useless men in her life can pretend to be more.

But in some strange way, there's no need to pretend with Nick. He's seen her in just about all of her worst moments in life; there's no point in trying to hide now. And whatever else has passed between them, he's never used her misery to make himself feel more important.

That feels good. She's sick of acting all the time, and she's sick of fighting for every single speck of respect, and she's just feeling sick in general because she's pregnant and queasy, and she's managed to go a whole day without finding one snack to tide her over.

That's got to stop, too. She's got to start taking better care of her body and the life growing inside of it. And she needs to start thinking about what happens next in her life. After the suppressant works. After the baby arrives. What does co-parenting with a Grimm look like?

There’s only one way to find out.

***

Bud’s place, it turns out, is a quaint suburban home in a quiet neighborhood on the other side of Portland. Bud, Nick explains on the walk to the front door, is an eisbiber and a good friend.

“Don’t—” Nick starts to say something and stops himself as he reaches the front step.

“Don’t what?” Adalind asks as Hank pulls in to park behind Nick’s car on the street.

“Nothing,” Nick says. “Just, try not to scare him. He’s doing us a big favor here.”

“You think I’m going to be mean to the man who’s letting me hide out in his home?”

“No? Yes? I know what you’re capable of, Adalind—”

“Right, I’m a monster! I forgot—”

“No. You’re a powerful lady who doesn’t like not being in control. And I get that. I respect it. But if you could just be nice to Bud, that would be great.”

“I can be nice,” Adalind says, and even she can hear the annoyance in her voice. “I can totally be nice.”

“That’s great,” Hank says, cutting off Nick’s rebuttal. “Now if you're both done with this little lovers quarrel, can we get inside the goddamn house? The whole point is not to be seen out here.”

The interior is only one burnt orange rug shy of 1970s chic, and Bud himself is a man out of time. He’s nervous and gentle and almost sweet. Adalind can see why Nick was worried.

“Is her husband—or you know, significant other in trouble, too?” he asks Nick. “‘Cause I have enough room. The fridge is stocked. Does he like pie?”

This last is directed to Adalind, and she can’t help but look to Nick with a smirk.

“Do you like pie?”

 _Nice_ , his look says—all dark, disproving eyes, with just a touch of amusement. _You promised to be nice._

Bud takes the news that Nick is going to be a father with someone other than Juliette surprisingly well. Better, in fact, than anyone else she’s spoken to in Portland.

“Yeah, okay,” Bud says finally. “I mean—you know—these things happen, I guess.”

 _They do,_ Adalind thinks. _They really, really do._

After Nick and Hank leave, she finds herself alone in a stranger’s living room, completely at his mercy. It might be the most vulnerable position she’s ever been in.

“So,” Bud says. “Do you like pie? Are you hungry?”

He looks so earnest and concerned. Adalind almost can’t stand it.

“I love pie,” she says, voice wearing a little thin after a long day fighting her battles with words instead of witchcraft, “and I’m absolutely starving.”

“Say no more,” Bud says, happy as a clam. “Let me take care of everything.”


	3. Chapter 3

_Once upon a time, there was a witch who really could have used a few good friends…_

***

Bud is a mothering sort of person, and that night he feeds Adalind to within an inch of her life and lets her take a long, hot shower, and then he gives her the coziest fleece nightgown she’s ever seen.

“It’s the wife’s, you know. It’s clean! Don’t worry about that. But I just thought, well those heels must be uncomfortable, and that can’t be good for the baby. I’ve got slippers, too, if you want them.”

She declines the slippers but ends up with a pair of fuzzy socks instead, and then Bud tucks her into the spare bedroom with all the care and sincerity in the world, and Adalind realizes that this, too, is magical. She sleeps better that night than she has in five years.

The next day, Bud gives her a breakfast big enough to kill for, and then she puts on the same dress and the same heels and joins Monroe and Rosalee on the trip to her mother’s grave.

“How are you feeling?” Rosalee asks from the front seat, and Adalind thinks she means it.

“Better,” she says. “Bud was very kind.”

Monroe and Rosalee share a look, but Adalind ignores it. Maybe she is going soft. Bud’s unending hospitality would make anyone a little soft.

That softness carries her right to her mother’s headstone where Sean is waiting with the exhumation order and a stern expression. Adalind wonders why he’s there at all. Is it for her, or is it for her mother, his dearly departed lover?

 _Hoo boy._ Not ready to dig into that this early in the morning.

They dig up her mother, and Adalind has a chance to finally say the things she’s wanted to say to Catherine Schade since Kelly Burkhardt killed her. It’s not eloquent by any stretch of the imagination, but it is sort of satisfying to know that her mother would hate this. Her mother would hate any sign of emotion or weakness, and she would doubly hate that Adalind managed to have a baby with Sean and still didn’t manage to net a crown, and she would absolutely lose her shit to find out that Adalind is now having a baby with the Grimm that Catherine spent her final years on earth trying to destroy.

All in all, digging up her mother is about as good as she could have hoped for.

Back at the spice shop she, Monroe, and Rosalee get to work on the corpse. There’s liver to extract and tongue to cut and ribs to grind. Luckily Rosalee has a strong stomach and a steady hand. Adalind can’t bring herself to make the first cut, but Rosalee takes over with the calm confidence of a woman ready to get this all over with, and Adalind respects that a lot.

There’s something about cutting up her mother with these two that just sort of resets their whole relationship. _Magic is binding_ , her mother had told her growing up. L _ike any ordeal, it draws people together or it can rip them apart. Be very careful who you practice magic with. There’s no such thing as a casual spell._

Turns out dissecting a corpse is pretty therapeutic, all considered. As Rosalee passes her mother’s tongue to Monroe, Adalind feels the last of her anger at their betrayal slipping away. She still misses Diana, of course. She’s never going to stop being unhappy that her daughter is out of her care. But Monroe and Rosalee are good people, and maybe—if she’s very lucky—maybe someday they’ll be her people, too.

***

With the bones ground into a fine powder, they’re nearing the end of this two day endeavor. It’s dark out now, and despite Bud’s impeccable care the night before, Adalind is starting to feel completely dead on her feet. She has to get out of these heels soon, and she’s sick of this dress, and she’s still nauseous because being pregnant kind of sucks sometimes, and there’s nothing she can do about that.

“Oh, Nick, she’s going to faint!” Rosalee says, just as he arrives at her side, and then Nick is there, catching her under the arms and hauling her to the cot like a sack of flour.

“Woah, Adalind! You need to lie down.”

She tries to protest, but he’s having none of it as he plunks her on the bed.

“No,” he says. “You need to stay right here.”

She surrenders because _hey_ , she was sick of standing in the heels anyway, and _oh look,_ Nick is tucking her legs under a blanket, and _hello, butterflies in her stomach_. She didn’t see those flighty fuckers coming, and now they’re fluttering up a storm.

Rosalee continues to manage the potion while Adalind directs from the bed. Nick brings her a glass of water, and Adalind wonders for a moment if this is what normal pregnancies are like. Well, they are making a magic potion, so normal-ish. But she’s never been taken care of like this before. She thought Bud was an anomaly, but as Nick bustles around making her comfortable and tucking her in, Adalind gets a brief glimpse of what being pregnant with a loving partner might be like.

It’s divine and also painful, because it’s not real, and it doesn’t mean anything, and Nick doesn’t love her, and she probably doesn’t love him.

Right?

_Right?_

_Later_ , she thinks. _We’ll deal with that much, much later_.

When the potion is done it’s her time to try it. She thinks about the last time she lost her powers. Nick was there. They were in the woods by the Bremen Ruins. She had come to break him, and he had come to end her, and somehow, they'd got everything they wanted in the worst way imaginable.

She remembers the kiss—the split second of absolute fire between them before she bit him. In retrospect, she’s not even sure she was trying to get him to stop. It was a hot, hateful kiss, and it went so, so wrong. She lost everything. She took everything from him in the process. And in some strange and powerful way, it led them right here, to this moment. A baby and a fresh start. A chance at something new.

And if she had to give up her powers again to get that chance, well—it would be worth it.

Of course no one knows she means to test the potion. They all surge toward her to try and make her stop, but Adalind takes three large gulps, and it’s done. Her course is set. She’s found her port in the storm in Portland, and she’s not giving it up now.

It doesn’t taste good, and it doesn’t help that Nick is watching her with big concerned eyes like a deadly puppy.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“Like I just drank my mother,” she says, and he snorts a little and gives her a stern look.

 _Oh._ Stern Nick is good. _Very good._

The transition is a little scary for everyone. Adalind is pretty out of it, but she can gather from the looks on everyone else's faces and the broken glass around the place that it was unpleasant at best and downright terrifying at the worst. But hey, that’s magic. It ain’t always pretty.

Nick takes her back to Bud’s house after. It’s quiet again in the car, and it’s a good thing he’s cute when he broods, or else Adalind would be very bummed out.

It still gets to her though, and by the time they get to Bud’s she is starting to feel even more vulnerable. Here she is powerless, and her protector is giving her the silent treatment.

When they get to the house, he takes a paper bag out of the trunk before leading her up the front path. Bud is there to open the door and ply them with food. After an awkward meal of semi-silence, Nick just shoves the paper bag her way. She takes it and sends him a questioning look, but he won’t meet her eyes.

In the bathroom, she opens the bag to find one pair of soft sweatpants close to her size, one oversized grey sweater that looks like it might have come from Nick’s personal collection, and a six pack of brand new cotton underwear that will almost certainly fit her butt exactly. For the first time in years, Adalind actually blushes, because he’s seen her butt well enough to guess the size with some accuracy.

The sweatpants must have come from Juliette’s collection, though, and as Adalind puts them on and rolls up the cuffs to fit her tiny legs, she realizes that Juliette might be the reason Nick has been so quiet tonight.

He’s just seen Adalind volunteer for what turned out to be an arduous and painful exorcism of her hexenbiest self. Now he has to convince Juliette to do the same. Adalind doesn’t envy him the prospect.

Back in bed in the spare room, now dressed in Juliette’s sweatpants and Nick’s sweater and fresh underwear that fits her perfectly—almost like magic—she looks up at Nick, and she feels apologetic. She’s done a lot to Nick, and she’s done it intentionally, but making Juliette a hexenbiest? That was never part of the plan.

“I’ve done a lot of bad things,” she tells him. “But I didn’t know that was going to happen to Juliette.”

“Get some sleep,” he says, and Adalind knows she won’t, not without asking the thing she’s been worrying about since he went stone cold silent.

“Nick? When this works for her—what happens to our baby?”

“No one’s going to take him from you this time.”

His face is cold and dark, but his response is swift, and Adalind knows he means it. Maybe he’s feeling a little guilty, too. Maybe they both just need to be kind to themselves and each other while they try to navigate this new path they’ve both been forced on.

***

The potion, it turns out, does not work. Not because it wasn’t made well or tested correctly but because Nick and his band of merry idiots handed Juliette the full container without a freaking back up plan.

"So, wait. Let me get this straight,” Adalind says, after navigating a tense conversation with Nick and then troubleshooting Sean’s spirit possession. These guys really need a witch on the payroll, but she has a bigger question right now. “You just handed Juliette the jar? The only container full of the irreplaceable potion that could control her, and you just handed it over without a back up plan?"

Nick looks to Hank and then back to Adalind. "Well, when you put it like that—"

"Oh my god,” she says. “Who are you people? Who raised you? How did you get this far in life without a lawyer or witch holding your freaking hands?”

Nick squirms a little on the bed beside her—embarrassed—and _oh, that’s kind of interesting_ —but Adalind is too annoyed to really appreciate it.

Because seriously, how did these people manage without her around? Everyone knows the laws of the last chance showdown. You offer the crazy lady half of your reserves, and when she breaks it like so much butterscotch, you have Wu jump out with a crossbow and shoot the other half into her freaking neck.

Mama Schade might have been a nightmare in every other respect, but damn it all to hell if she would have let baby Adalind get away with such shoddy spycraft.

“I wanted to trust her,” Nick says, softly, and he looks a little broken. “I went home just now. The bed was a mess. I think she might have had sex with someone in our bed. She’s taunting me, I guess. Punishing me.”

“Nick...” Adalind wants to comfort him, but she doesn’t know what to say.

“No, it’s fine,” he says, although of course it isn’t. “It’s just...I don’t think I knew her really. Not at all.”

But how well does anyone know another person before shit really hits the fan? Adalind knows Nick and Juliette have gone through troubles together—Adalind’s caused most of those troubles, to be fair. But this is the first time Juliette has had agency in a change, and Adalind thinks that’s the difference. This is the first time Juliette’s own idea of herself has been on the line, and in the aftermath of that harsh reality, she is shedding all her peacetime comforts and external responsibilities like a deadly butterfly.

There’s something primal going on with Juliette now—a fight for who she is and who she ultimately wants to be—and Adalind understands that better than most. What gaining hexenbiest powers has done for Juliette is almost the same as what losing them did for Adalind. This is the crucible. The ordeal. This is when you find out if you really are a witch. And the woman who comes out the other side won’t be anything like the one that went in, but she’ll still be herself. Her essential self.

 _It’s just kind of a bummer_ , Adalind thinks, watching Nick’s brooding face while she tentatively reaches out to squeeze his hand. It’s just a bummer that right now Juliette’s most essential self is a deadly witch with an axe to grind.

***

Things get worse from there. The Royals manage to kill Nick’s mother and kidnap Diana, again. Adalind is genuinely distraught by the thought of Kelly Burkhardt’s death, which is a real turn up considering, well, everything.

Kelly Burkhardt killed Adalind’s mother, but she also saved Adalind from that forest in Austria. Kelly Burkhardt stole Diana, but she also kept her safe from the opposing forces that wanted Diana as nothing more than a weapon of mass destruction and control.

So Kelly Burkhardt has a complicated legacy in Adalind’s life, but she’s also her baby’s grandmother, and oh dear lord—

_How on earth are they going to explain to this baby about his family tree?_

Adalind doesn’t have too much time to worry about that now. Nick needs her to help him find the Royals, and Adalind is right on board. She might not have powers anymore, but she has more than enough nerve to deliver a decapitated head, thank you very much.

It’s a little silly how easy it is to sneak into the hotel. There’s no sneaking involved, really. Kenneth forgot to have her access card deactivated, the idiot, which means she can waltz right in with the head and a smile.

The head goes in the closet, and she shuts the doors again. This is her chance to perform. She gives herself a little shake—getting ready for the scene—and then she takes a deep breath, opens the doors, and screams her head off to her heart’s content.

Wu arrives first, and Adalind is really starting to like his face. It’s comforting, somehow. Reassuring. He’s also a wonderful scene partner and very accommodating.

“Hello, Ms…?”

“Schade,” she says, voice quivering just enough to reach the beat cop in the back of the room. “Adalind Schade. It’s so awful, officer! Who would want to do something like this?”

“Oh, you know,” Wu says, “Portland isn’t always as peaceful as it seems.”

“Oh, I know,” Adalind says, really leaning into the part and laying it on thick. “Will no one defend us on these mean streets?”

Wu almost cracks at that—his lips twitch and his eyes sparkle—but he just nods solemnly.

“You know what? I have just the hero for you. Let me give him a call. Can I get you a chair and something to drink, Ms. Schade? While you wait?”

“Oh, thank you,” she says, fluttering her eyelashes a little, just for the fun of it. “Thank you.”

It’s all over the top, but in the end Adalind gets to sit in a comfy chair with her feet up and sip a refreshing beverage until Nick rides in on a wave of righteousness like the plainclothes knight he is.

When he arrives, Wu gives the introductions.

“Ms. Schade, these are detectives Burkhardt and Griffin.”

And in her head she thinks, _Yep, sure are! I’ve seen them both naked!_

It’s not a great time to remember that, but Nick keeps the scene moving effortlessly.

“Can you tell us what happened?”

“I came back to my room,” she says. “I’d been gone a couple of days—and I opened the closet door and there it was. It was awful. I’m pregnant, you know.”

She’s really enjoying this, and so is Nick if the little smirk lurking around his lips is any indication. Hank just rolls his eyes and leaves the room. On reflection, she really has some apologizing to do to Hank.

Nick gets rid of the manager, and then it’s just the two of them.

“You okay?” he asks as soon as they're alone. Adalind almost feels a little touched.

“I almost went into labor with all that screaming,” she says. She’s a little touched; she’s not a changed woman.

He doesn’t bat a lash at her snark. “You did good,” he says—his voice dark and approving in her ear—and she’s more than a little touched. She’s kind of taken. And then suddenly she’s struck by the fact that Nick is now in some way hers.

Not hers-hers obviously. He’s not her boyfriend, or her friend-friend, or her partner. There’s nothing voluntary about their relationship. But he is her baby’s father, and he is her...family?

_How in the actual hell did that happen?_

Nevermind. But his mother just died, and she was family, too, in some weird way, and Adalind’s only just had time to process that, so before he leaves the room she lays a hand on his arm and draws him back.

“Hey—I’m sorry about your mom. I know how much that hurts.” He doesn’t look convinced, and Adalind understands.

“She died trying to save my daughter,” she says. She doesn’t say: _your mom raised Diana_. She doesn’t say: _our son deserved to meet his grandmother_. She doesn’t say: _your mom made you a good man, and I hope you forget all about that tonight and kill the bastards who did this to her_.

She doesn’t say any of that, of course, but as Nick charges out of the room hell bent on vengeance, Adalind wonders if he might have heard it anyway.

***

Back at Bud’s, he, Monroe, Rosalee, and Trubel are just sitting down for dinner. There’s already a place set for Adalind at the table—even though they had no way of knowing when she might be home. It’s nice to come home to people who are expecting her and want to feed her. It’s nice to be a part of this little band of wesen and Grimms who take care of each other even at the worst of times.

It’s nice to maybe even have friends. Eventually. Hopefully.

“I can’t believe Kelly got killed,” Monroe says over dinner.

“Were you with him when he found his mother’s body?” Rosalee directs the question to Trubel, who Adalind thinks must have been raised by wolves given her table manners or lack thereof.

It’s kind of...sweet? She knows that’s crazy—Grimms aren’t sweet—but Trubel kind of is. She’s so young, and she’s so adult for her age, and she’s seen so much and killed so many, and no one taught her how to behave at the dinner table, and that just makes Adalind want to cry a little.

Stupid pregnancy hormones.

“It wasn’t her body,” Trubel is saying. “They put her head in a box for him to find.”

Well, there goes the urge to cry. And there’s the nausea again, right on cue.

Nick and Hank arrive shortly thereafter, and it turns out that Juliette has gone full Adalind now and is working with the Royals to help them kill Kelly and take Diana.

Adalind never realized how annoying it was, being on this side of the hexenbiest agenda.

The team rolls out to go storm the castle, and Adalind watches Monroe lean in to say goodbye to Rosalee with a kiss.

It’s really sweet and also completely foreign. Adalind has never had that, and she may never get the chance. She can feel the urge to cry again creeping up on her tear ducts, and holy hell, this pregnancy thing just sucks.

Rosalee must notice something is wrong, because she’s at Adalind’s side as soon as the front door closes.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Tired, angry, scared,” Adalind says. She turns away so she won’t start crying in front of Rosalee, but Rosalee is there anyway. Taking her arm—leading her to the couch.

“Bud, could you make us some hot chocolate, please?” Rosalee asks, wrapping one arm around Adalind on the couch and patting her hair. Bud jumps right to it, eager to get out of the room and put his nervous energy to use.

Rosalee should be the pregnant one, Adalind thinks. She’s so good at it already, and it’s not fair that Adalind just doesn’t know how to do this. She never got the chance to raise a baby before. Isn’t the second one supposed to be easier?

“This is so hard,” Adalind says into Rosalee’s neck, and if she sounds a little whiny, Rosalee is kind enough not to mention it. “Why is this so hard?”

“You thought having Nick’s baby would be easy?”

“No. Of course not. I thought having Nick’s baby would be impossible. I never considered any of this, Rosalee, and now Kelly is dead, and Diana’s with the Royals, and Juliette just sucks— Sorry, I know she’s your friend.”

“No,” Rosalee says, calmly but forcefully. “She stopped being my friend the day she tried to kill Monroe. I’d rip her throat out myself if Nick hadn’t already called dibs.”

Adalind sits up and looks at Rosalee. Her mouth is set, and her eyes are angry. She means it, and that warms Adalind’s little witchy heart.

“I knew I always liked you,” Adalind says, and Rosalee smiles.

“I think I could learn to like you, too,” she says.

***

In the end, they don’t recover Diana. It’s a low blow, but it’s also starting to pale a little in comparison to everything else that’s going on. Kelly is dead. Juliette is dead. Trubel is missing, presumed to be dead, which sucks because Adalind was just starting to think they might actually get on. Eventually, anyway. At least Diana is known to be alive and in the company of people completely invested in keeping her alive. It’s not much, but it is something.

Adalind is also going into labor, and that’s a bit of an unpleasant surprise. The thing about carrying a hexenbiest baby is that traditional healthcare can’t really help you predict the due date. Hexenbiest babies grow on their own schedule—maybe Grimm babies do, too, who knows—but this one has been in overdrive for the last few weeks, and now he’s done and ready to make his entrance to the world.

Whatever she expected from having this baby, somehow she never pictured having to talk Bud through driving her to the hospital. But as birthing partners go, he’s actually top notch. When they get to the front desk he knows just what to tell them and what to ask for. Panicked phone call to Nick aside, Bud has her in a private birthing suite doing lamaze breathing before she knows what’s even happening.

When the pushing starts, she’s glad her powers are suppressed. With the pain she’s experiencing, it would be impossible to control the levitation, and the whole OB team would know about magic pretty damn quickly.

As it is, everything is going fine until Nick walks in. The baby’s heart rate starts to plummet, and the doctor has to explain that the baby is stressed, so they’ll have to give her an emergency C-section. They seem puzzled by this, but even with labor-brain Adalind can deduce that a hexenbiest baby doesn’t naturally feel safe in the company of a Grimm, even if it is his father.

What she remembers of the C-section is not fun, but in the end she survives and so does her baby, and that’s all she can ask for, really. In recovery, she finds herself thinking of Meisner—her last unexpected birthing partner. He was good to her then. She wonders where he is these days.

The thought leaves her as soon as she sees her son.

He is perfect—all chubby cheeks and button nose and new baby smell. She gets to hold him as much as she wants, and no one wants to steal him, and it’s magical. All of it.

Rosalee appears eventually, and she’s the first person besides the medical staff who gets to meet Adalind’s perfect baby.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Adalind asks.

“He’s gorgeous,” Rosalee agrees, reaching out one finger to run it down his soft, rosy cheek.

“Where’s Nick?”

“Something came up,” Rosalee says. “I could tell you, but it’s a little crazy and pretty dangerous, and I don’t quite understand it myself.”

 _That tracks_ , Adalind thinks. If you have a baby with a Grimm, you have to be ready for him to be doing Grimm things, even when all you want to do is show off his new baby.

Rosalee is looking a little thin around the edges, and Adalind wonders when this woman has time to sleep between running a business and running Nick’s research operations. _We’re going to need to fix that_ , she thinks, when she’s in a position to help manage the group.

 _Oh, and there it is_. Her powers might be suppressed, but her ambition sure isn’t. Gotta love a power vacuum. Don’t threaten Adalind Schade with a good time.

But in the meantime, she can get started on being a better friend to Rosalee, who has gone above and beyond to help protect Adalind and her baby.

“Rosalee, why don’t you sit down? Are you okay?”

“Aren’t I supposed to be asking you that? You just had a C-section, Adalind. I’m fine.”

“You’re exhausted. I’ve been doped up for hours. So sit. Tell me what’s going on.”

Rosalee sits and tells her about Nick’s little trip to the dark side today, and the new unknown organization that seems to be making headway in Portland, and Adalind thinks, _huh_. She forgets sometimes that she and the Royals are not Nick’s only problem. He defends the whole city, and he cares a lot about Trubel. He’ll tear the place apart if that’s what it takes to find her.

It’s kind of hot, which is ridiculous because she literally just had a baby, and the last thing she needs right now is to get turned on thinking about Nick Burkhardt, but well, there it is.

Nick arrives at her bedside eventually.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, clearly at a loss of anything else to say, and Adalind sends him a little smile.

“Better now,” she tells him, and she tries to play it cool—like she means now that the baby is delivered safely and not better now because Nick is here and hopefully ready to meet their son.

“I wasn’t sure you would want to be here,” she tells him—foiling her own attempt at chill, and then she says, “I don’t know, maybe you don’t want to be here—” and oh god, how does she turn this thing off, “—but at least you are here. Don’t hate me anymore, Nick. For our son’s sake, we can’t be like we were.”

Nick is still hovering by the back wall, brooding up a storm, but it doesn’t matter because her treacherous mouth is still going.

“I don’t want to raise him by myself. He’s as much of you as he is of me.” _And he’s going to need a Grimm role model in about twenty years_ , she thinks, but doesn’t say. Thank god.

“I know I can’t force you to be there for him,” she says, and it might be the most circumspect Adalind Schade has ever been about her own personal sphere of influence and control. It’s easy with Nick. She knows with every fiber of her being that she can’t force him to do anything he doesn’t want to do. Suppressed powers notwithstanding, he also can’t force her to do anything she doesn’t want to do. They are equally matched and stubborn as hell. There will be no unwilling compromises between them.

“I will be,” Nick says, and it’s a promise. A promise to help her raise their son. A promise to be a good father. A promise to be her partner in this, whatever it takes.

 _It’s enough_ , she thinks, as she hands their son over into Nick’s slightly shaking hands. It’ll have to be.

But the look on Nick’s face when she tells him she wants to name their baby Kelly? That’s more than enough.

That’s everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the wonderful feedback so far! Hope you enjoyed this chapter!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the lovely comments, folks! This chapter's a little early, because I got excited. It didn't exist until Thursday, when I realized it needed to, so I really hope you like it, too!

_Once upon a time, there was a very brave witch who went to live with a Grimm…_

***

The next day, Adalind wakes in utter panic. Her hospital gown clings to the cold sweat she’s drenched in, and she would sit up with a start if her abdominal stitches weren’t aching like a sonofabitch.

She doesn’t notice any of that though. The only place her eyes go is the empty bassinet beside her bed.

“Kelly? Kelly!”

Not again, she thinks, feeling like she wants to hurl and dismantle this hospital brick by fucking brick. _Never fucking again_.

She’s shouting viciously at a nurse by the time Nick walks in. Some quiet, deadly part in the back of her brain knows the nurse has no idea why Adalind is all but screaming for someone to bring her Kelly, but she can’t control it. This raw, ugly thing is clawing at her chest—a wild thing looking to protect its young—and the minute she sees Nick, it lashes out.

“You promised,” she yells, “you promised no one would take him from me, you bastard!”

Nick doesn’t even blink, just sets his coffee down on the tray beside her bed and leans in close—so close their noses are almost touching—and his dark eyes bore into hers, and she thinks if she had her powers right now, she would see his dead Grimm eyes. Of course, if she had her powers right now, the whole hospital would be rubble, so there is that.

That thought calms her down slightly, and so does Nick’s calm, steady voice.

“Adalind,” he says, “I’m here, and I promise you Kelly is, too. He’s down the hall getting some tests. The Royals have left Portland, and no one else knows he exists yet. We’re going to keep it that way as long as possible, and anyone who wants to take him will have to come through me, Monroe, Rosalee, Hank, Wu, and half of the Portland PD. And you. You’re the last defense, Adalind, so calm down and save all of this for the real bastards who might want to hurt you or our son to get to me.”

It’s the tone that reaches her—the deadly gravitas there—the controlled sense of actual, primal power. She’s spent years faffing around with men who thought they had power—royals with their armies and their game of musical thrones—and none of them, she realizes suddenly, had half the power Nick has running through his veins. Nick doesn’t even need to rule the world to get what he wants and protect what’s his—all he needs is a weapon and his little band of do-gooders.

That’s how powerful he is.

It’s a good thing she doesn’t have her hexenbiest powers right now, she thinks in that quiet, deadly place in the back of her brain. If she did, she might just have to kiss him.

Maybe he feels it, too. His dark, killer eyes drop to her lips and flutter back—wide now with shock and confusion, and Adalind almost laughs. He’s still just Nick. The most powerful Grimm in the whole world and also a total dumbass.

It’s almost...sweet.

She sighs then, and he pulls back, giving her shoulder a squeeze before retracting his hand. She didn’t even notice he’d touched her—that’s how focused she’d been on his eyes and his voice and his promise.

“I’ll go get Kelly,” he says now, voice normal and soft. She nods at his retreating back and wonders—absently—what it would be like to have a baby with this man on purpose.

_Pretty great, probably_ , she thinks.

***

Later that morning, a new nurse comes in to talk about Adalind and Kelly's discharge process. Nick stands quietly by the bed while the nurse outlines aftercare practices for Adalind’s stitches and the cord still stuck to Kelly’s belly button, and then she asks about car seats and transportation from the hospital to home, and Adalind looks up at Nick to find him staring down at her.

“We’ll take care of it,” he says, and the nurse leaves.

“We will?” Adalind asks.

“I will,” he says. “Rosalee will probably help. She seems to like you, all of a sudden.”

“Magic,” Adalind says. “Not my magic—just doing it together. It does that sometimes. Binds people together.”

“Yeah?” He’s smiling, and she wonders if he’s thinking about them, too. God knows, there’s been a lot of spells between them over the years.

“So, I’m guessing you don’t have another place lined up,” Nick says, looking away from her now. Adalind follows his gaze to Kelly, nestled on her chest like a limpet. He’s asleep, but Adalind can’t bear to put him down yet, so she just strokes his warm, swaddled back and holds him close like the little miracle he is.

Nick is right though. She does not have a place lined up. She’s been running to or from the Royals for years, and it’s never made sense to keep a place in Portland while she was constantly on the move.

And then there’s the little issue of money. She does have some, actually. A get-free bank account with enough to change her name and get the hell out of dodge if she had to. Enough to move to some place like Montana, maybe, and dye her hair and hide out in the sticks where no one, not even Nick, could find her.

It’s a tempting thought. To just take Kelly and go—find a place no one will notice them and just fall off the map. There be dragons, and all that. One reformed hexenbiest and her son at the edge of the world.

Except there’s Diana—still out there somewhere—and Rosalee—maybe her first friend since college—and Nick. Kelly’s dad. The man who would kill for them or die trying. And as much as she’s tempted to run away, she can’t now. She’s made her choice, and she’s chosen him. Of all the players in Portland and Vienna, she chose him, and he hasn’t let her down yet. She won’t let him down, either.

“I don’t have a place yet,” she tells him. She could get one with her get-free money, but the thought makes her nauseous and scared. That money is her fuck-you money. Not enough for a rich life, just enough to say no to power when it really counts. To pick up sticks and leave and never look back. Through years of running around the globe, seducing power and playing for keeps, she’s held on to it like a safety blanket—the thought that she could leave everything behind if she really, really had to. She needs that, she thinks, even now. Even though she trusts Nick more than any other man she’s met. She still needs her fuck-you money in reserve. Just in case.

Maybe Nick can sense that. The fear in her eyes. The way her heart pounds like a hunted animal. He’s very calm and deliberate when he reaches out to cover her hand on Kelly’s back with his own.

“You can come home with me,” he says. “We’ll figure it out. I promise.”

***

Nick leaves for an hour or two and comes back with a car seat for Kelly and a change of clothes for Adalind. There’s Juliette’s pants again, and the underwear that’s suspiciously tailored to her butt, and then a soft blue button down shirt that smells a little like Nick and makes her feel warm and squirmy inside.

“I know it’s not what you’re used to,” he says, and she thinks he must have misinterpreted her surprise and guilty pleasure for disapproval. “I can’t quite stretch to Armani, but we will get you some stuff that fits once we get Kelly settled in.”

“Armani?” She’s confused now. When was the last time she wore Armani? Five years ago, at least.

When they met.

_Huh._

“I know you like the finer things, Adalind,” he says, and there’s no judgement there. It’s just a fact he knows about her. She has expensive taste. And he’s not wrong—she does—but mostly she buys expensive things to get her money’s worth out of the assholes she’s been hanging out with. If she’s going to pay for it with her body or her power, she’s going to get nice shit, that’s just common sense.

But Nick doesn’t want her body or her power. Nick wants to protect their son and her and all of Portland, if he can. It’s an entirely new market economy, as far as Adalind is concerned, and she doesn’t want to spend his money on frivolous things. She doesn’t want to spend his money at all, actually, and that’s an entirely new concept for her.

“I don’t need Armani, Nick,” she says. “I don’t have anyone to impress these days. You’ve seen me at my absolute worst—I don’t think high end clothing is going to fix that, do you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says, smiling—maybe even working up to something like a grin. “I liked the Armani, you know. Before you went all corpse bride and tried to kill me.”

“Gee,” she says—glaring at him now and fighting her own smile—“thanks.”

***

Going back to the house that Nick shared with Juliette is just plain weird. So much has happened in this house—years of domestic bliss, presumably, but also a whole heap of pain. Adalind’s first few days with Diana before she was stolen—that one crazy witch-fight with Juliette—and most recently, the deaths of Kelly Burkhardt, Trubel, and Juliette.

_If Juliette’s haunting the place, I’m out_ , Adalind thinks, but when they walk in the door Rosalee and Monroe are there with all the baby stuff she could ever wish for.

“Oh my God,” she says. “You did all this?”

“Well, it’s not as if you two had the time,” Monroe says, and he could not be more correct. There really hasn’t been a moment since she told Nick about their baby to think about things like baby clothes and bottles and a crib. All these things that she never had a chance to need with Diana.

“And I picked up a few things for the new mom, too,” Rosalee says, and Adalind nearly cries. It’s overwhelming, having friends. It’s beautiful.

Rosalee takes her on a tour of the kitchen, pointing out the baby bottles and spit up cloths and silly, pedestrian things like where Nick and Juliette kept the cutlery and mugs. Adalind looks around the kitchen and feels a little like Alice in Wonderland—strange and wide-eyed. Is it supposed to be her kitchen now? Her mugs? Is she supposed to settle in here—in Juliette’s house, with Juliette’s boyfriend, and the baby that probably should have been Juliette’s, too?

The thought makes her shiver.

“You okay?” Rosalee asks.

“Yeah,” Adalind says. “No. I think I felt a ghost.”

“Oh,” Rosalee says, looking around the kitchen with new eyes. “Yeah, it is a little creepy, maybe. Juliette’s stuff.”

“Juliette’s blood. My blood. All over the hall.”

“This house needs a makeover.”

“Rosalee, this house needs an exorcism and a wrecking ball.”

Rosalee laughs out loud at that, and then Adalind does, too. It’s a surprise for both of them—their sudden shared laughter in this strange and broken place.

“I’ll bring some sage and incense this afternoon,” Rosalee says. “I know it won’t do much, but it can’t hurt, can it?”

“Definitely not,” Adalind says. “We’ll smudge the whole damn house.”

***

Left alone with Nick, things just get weirder. He’s been quiet and intense since Kelly was born—since Kelly was a bump in her belly really—but now he lurks around the house like he, too, is haunting it. However painful it is for Adalind to settle into the same guest room she once nursed Diana in, it must be even more painful for Nick to wander from room to room and remember who died in each space.

She wanders downstairs at some point, finally feeling safe enough to leave Kelly napping upstairs on his own, and finds Nick vibrating with nervous energy while he makes a sandwich. It strikes her then how much they don’t know about each other. She’s never imagined him making food before—it’s never come up—and when he offers her a sandwich, she has to tell him about her allergy to tomatoes. One more weakness she has to trust him with.

“So, I am thinking of selling the house,” Nick says, too casually to be casual, and Adalind thinks simultaneously, _Oh thank god_ , and, _Oh fuck_.

Because where is she going to go now?

“Find us someplace safer,” he says, and she can breathe again.

“We’re going with you?”

“Yeah,” he says, “if you like.”

She likes. She really, really likes.

“Sure,” she says and takes a bite of what might be the best sandwich she’s ever had.

***

The rest of the afternoon is a little better in the sense that Nick is out of the house for a case, so he’s not haunting it anymore. Rosalee comes by to cleanse the place, and they end up talking like friends—the first girl talk Adalind can remember participating in since she left Portland four years ago—and it’s another kind of magic all over again.

Then the FBI shows up, and she remembers that nothing about her life will ever be normal.

When Nick gets home, she’s relieved to see him. She’s a lawyer, and she knows not to talk to the feds, but the stony silence was getting to be a bit much.

She considers staying, to offer Nick legal advice if nothing else, but one look at his face tells her that’s the last thing he needs right now. She takes the baby upstairs with Rosalee, and then stands at the top of the stairs and listens to Nick brazen his way through the interview. He does good, and she thinks about the young cop he used to be—all bright eyed and bushy tailed and righteous as fuck. That kid drove her crazy, and he certainly never would have lied to the feds.

She only misses him a little.

She goes downstairs after the agents leave and finds him standing at the front door, arms outstretched, hands gripped tight around the doorframe, tension running up his spine.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, looking around too quickly to reassure her.

“Why was the FBI here?” She heard some of it, but she’d like to hear it from him.

“Just had to do with an old case,” he says, like a liar, and she gets that. He’s only just learning to trust her, and he doesn’t want to worry her with his stuff, but they share a baby now, and she needs to know if he’s going to be arrested tomorrow or not.

“I don’t like this, Nick,” she says, and it comes out a lot more forcefully than she expected. “If something happens to you—I have Kelly, but I have no job and nowhere to live—no place to raise him. What if he’s like me? What if he’s like you? What if he’s some weird combination of the both of us—like some hexengrimm or grimmerbiest—I can’t do this alone!”

All of this comes vomiting out of her mouth, and Nick takes it all in stride as he stalks towards her and takes her shoulders to lean down and look directly in her eyes.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says—like he knows—and they just stare at each other for a moment—dark eyes to blue—and Adalind feels the shift between them. Something soft emerging from the rubble of all their past mistakes.

“I’m sorry,” she says, quietly now. “I really don’t expect anything from you. I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”

They’re both quiet then, eyes locked together, tension fading and then swelling again. A new tension. Some kind of awareness. His eyes flick down to her lips, and for one moment she thinks he just might kiss her.

Then his phone rings. She’s lived with this man for less than twelve hours, and she’s already sick of his phone. It rings at the absolute worst times.

It’s Hank, of course, and Nick has to leave again. Some paternity leave this is shaping up to be. Nick stops by her on his way out the door, and there’s that look again. The impulse to say something—do something—kiss each other maybe, because their lives are scary, and they just had a baby, and it would be so very nice to just fall together and get it over with.

But what they have isn’t easy, and it isn’t guaranteed. And if they kissed each other now—before they figure out how to live together and raise their baby and be good to each other—that’s all they’ll ever be. Ships in the night. Meaningless comfort. Two fucked up people who made a baby in a fucked up way.

And that’s not what she wants. She wants a partner. She wants her kid to have a dad. She wants a new life, in which her safety is not dependent on who she’s sleeping with or how much power she has. And she has a chance here. Kelly gave them that, so she plans to take it and follow this chance at a life with Nick all the way to the end of the line.

***

Later that night she wakes up to find him standing over Kelly’s crib, looking lost and a little confused.

“Nick? Everything all right?”

He turns to look at her with dark, dark eyes, and no, Adalind thinks. Nothing is all right.

“They wouldn’t listen to me,” he says. “The marshals wouldn’t listen, and now they’re dead. And the guy that did it—he wasn’t working alone. This wasn’t a usual homicide—he had a partner. They were fighting for something. Some shared cause. Wu had to kill the guy—he was wild—and then his partner killed herself so we couldn’t get any more information. All we have is a symbol we can’t make sense of and a catch phrase we can barely translate, and I hate it. I know every wesen faction in this city, and this is new, and that can’t be good.”

He’s pacing, now, and spiralling a little, and Adalind feels a little better about her freak out earlier. So long as they keep switching off panic attacks, they’ll be fine.

“Nick,” she says, as calmly as possible. “It’s going to be okay.”

“You don’t know that,” he says, violently, and she laughs a little, startling him out of his pacing.

“I do actually,” she says. “Do you have any idea how many big bads I’ve watched you run out of this town? You’ll find these guys, and you’ll dismantle them. You always do. The team will help. When Kelly’s a little less brand new, I will help. This is your city, and now it’s my city, and you and me, Nick? We protect what’s ours.”

He’s breathing heavily, but all of his attention is now locked on to her.

“Ours,” he says. “Yes.”

“Good,” she says. “Now pass me Kelly and get some sleep. The monsters will still be out there, ready to be beheaded when you wake up, I promise.”

_There’s an awful lot of promising going on around here_ , she thinks.

***

Over the next week, between learning how to take care of a newborn, they also make a stab at packing up the old house and getting ready for the move. She doesn’t have much to pack, but she helps Nick with the kitchen contents. She would offer to help with his room, but she remembers the last time they were in there, and she’s sure he does, too.

Dappled afternoon sunlight. The press of him against her. The best sex she can remember in a very long time.

So no, she doesn’t offer to help with his room, and in the end, they’re too exhausted by taking care of Kelly to manage much.

“Fuck it,” he says one night, when they are both sitting at the kitchen counter nursing one beer between them, punch drunk on sleep deprivation and the smell of baby puke. “I’m hiring someone to pack the house.”

“Oh thank god,” she says. “I can’t stay upright one more minute.”

“Do I have to carry you upstairs?” His eyes have a little sparkle in them tonight, and she adores this. Nick’s not a natural flirt, but he is charming, and he does tease, and she absolutely loves it.

“That’s some big talk from a man who almost slipped off his stool a minute ago,” she says, taking a swing of beer and passing it back to him to finish. She’s breastfeeding, and she doesn’t even like beer, but she really, really needed that sip.

“I could do it,” he says, grinning tiredly. “If I had to.”

“Mmmm,” she hums, just thinking about it. “I knew you Grimms had to be good for something.”

“I’m good at many things,” he says, and she hums again, thinking _yes, sandwiches and beheadings and afternoon delight, oh my_.

“Not tonight,” she says, letting him off the hook with a smile that he shares with her. The house is quiet for the first time in days. Kelly is finally asleep. They both should get some rest before the next cry breaks their little moment of peace. Tonight is not the night when they figure this thing out between them.

_Not tonight_ , she thinks. _But hopefully not never, either_.


	5. Chapter 5

_Once upon a time, a witch and a Grimm went to live in a very strange castle…_

***

Living with Nick is weird, and even a month in, it just doesn’t get any less so.

His idea of the ideal place to raise their son is a bleak-looking, bunker-like apartment in an abandoned paint factory on the other side of Portland. When they moved in, she took one look at the murder loft and decided that this place would also need a cleansing, decoration, and maybe a full gut and redesign, depending on how long Nick planned to have them stay there.

But still, it’s home. In many ways, it’s the best home she’s ever had. It’s not exactly hers, but Nick never makes her feel like she doesn’t belong there. Her mother had been very clear growing up that the house was not Adalind’s in any way. Hexenbiests are bee-like people in that respect. There can only be one queen in a place, and generally hexenbiest daughters are expected to hive off and find their own nest, only Catherine Schade never really let Adalind do that. There was always some scheme to manage—some prince to woo—and Adalind never felt like her life was her own, not even when she had her own place in Portland.

After Portland there were castles. So many fucking castles. What the fairytales never tell you about castles is that they’re cold and dark and damp as fuck. They also tend to be full of princes, and those bastards never let anyone get comfortable.

So, she kind of loves the loft now, which she’s affectionately calling the ‘fome.’ It’s not really clever enough for her to find it as amusing as she does, but hey, she just had a baby, and she hasn’t slept in a month.

The bar is low.

The postpartum hormones are also driving her wild. She feels awkward and uncomfortable in her body all of the time—especially when she has to make passable attempts at small talk with Nick, like he’s her college roommate and not the father of her actual baby.

And in another recent and terrible turn of events, every single thing Nick does at the moment seems to be perfectly calibrated to turn her on.

He's on the phone with Hank right now— _in command mode_ —and she would give just about anything to have him handcuff her and boss her around in bed. Or she could handcuff him. That would be fun, too.

Before the call with Hank, Nick was brooding—something she’s coming to think of as the least attractive quality in a man—but she had still wanted to crawl into his lap and grind against him until he was too hard to even contemplate sulking for a while.

Adalind's sure if he actually, properly smiled her way right now, she would pretty much catch fire, so all in all, it's probably for the best that he can't even be bothered to smirk at her tonight. She’s particularly crazy about his smirk these days. She wants to taste it—suck it away—maybe even grind against it, if he's feeling generous. Which he isn't. He can barely stop brooding. But man, _oh, ma_ n, a girl can dream.

The good news is that everyone else has been great. Kelly is amazing, of course, and Rosalee has been an incredible resource and support. They only survived the colic because of her, and if Monroe wasn’t in the picture, Adalind would be seriously considering a baby raising throuple right about now. Still, Monroe is the best uncle a kid could ask for, and even Hank and Wu sent them some baby toys, which seems extraordinarily decent given their history.

They still don’t know where Trubel is, and that’s making Nick a little stir crazy. Adalind gets the sense that he has never had this much time off from work before, and the down time doesn’t suit him. Which explains a lot about Grimms, actually. Adrenaline junkies, the whole lot of them.

Kelly should be fun, then, when he gets older.

And all of this means that she’s finally learning a bit about what’s like to live with a good cop. It’s basically work all the time—even when he’s on paternity leave. Even when he’s not out in the field, he’s thinking about it—processing information from Hank—dreaming up new ways to catch killers before they strike next. She’s been a lawyer for ten years, and she had no idea that this was what the long arm of the law could look like when it was at home. It’s honestly kind of impressive.

She’s lived with plenty of men over the years—not altogether happily it must be said—but living with Nick is still a whole new world.

She knew that he was a minimalist at heart as soon as she got to the loft, but it turns out he’s also kind of a neat freak. Everything has a place in the loft, and he likes it when everything is in its place. That’s a bit of a challenge while they are both fighting an uphill battle just to keep Kelly fed, clothed, and well rested. They are not well rested as a result of all of that maintenance, plus the colic, and the first time Nick had a full on bitch fit about the laundry piling up, Adalind hadn’t thought twice about telling him exactly where he could shove it.

It’s nice, actually. There was a moment there when she thought she would have to be on her best behavior forever to stay with Nick. A moment when she thought that one wrong word or petty action would destroy everything they’re building here and leave her homeless on the streets with nowhere to go and no one to turn to.

That is not the case. They’ve both yelled at each other a lot in this first month of parenthood and cohabitation, but they’ve also had the chance to show each other remarkably simple kindnesses that make Adalind think, by some miracle, this might actually work.

Like the day after a week of sleepless nights, when Kelly had cried for six hours from the moment his morning nap ended to the moment Nick walked in the door. They’d run out of adult food the night before, and between being up with Kelly all night and comforting him all day, she’d barely been able to sneak the last spoonful of peanut butter into her mouth, much less think about the state of the loft. But when Nick walked in, he hadn’t even looked at the laundry, just marched over to her and scooped up Kelly from her arms, dumping a takeout bag full of fried ravioli and pasta carbonara and garlic bread and caesar salad with fat, cheesy croutons on her lap.

“You were talking in your sleep last night,” he said. “You were passed out at the table. Something about all the carbs? Anyway, go wild.”

There was also the day he fell asleep with Kelly on his chest like a big softy, and Adalind treated herself to a forty-five minute shower and then did all the dishes and threw the laundry in the washer and made herself a cup of tea before she woke him up with a beer. He’d been so happy when he saw the kitchen sink, she thought he might have even kissed her if Hank hadn’t called at that exact moment.

It’s a good reminder that Nick is ultimately a package deal. There’s something very Spice Girls about all of this. She’s swaying with Kelly in front of the couch tonight, and since she’s already sort of dancing, she throws in a bit of singing as well.

“If you want to be my lover, you gotta get with my friends…”

“Spice Girls? Really?” Nick is off the phone now, and— _oh crap_ —he’s smirking.

“It’s a classic,” she says, glaring at him just a little. How dare he smirk at her and do nothing about it?

Nick raises his hands in a defensive gesture. “Hey, I’m not arguing. If Kelly’s happy, I’m happy.”

“Mmmm,” she hums and looks down at Kelly where he’s gurgling and sucking his fist against her collar bone. “How about it, baby? Who’s your favorite Spice?”

“Baby Spice,” Nick says, giving her a full smile now. “Obviously.”

Sometimes it hurts, how perfect he is.

He moves on to the kitchen, rooting in the fridge for a beer. He drinks beer at home, and Adalind doesn’t know why that’s surprising to her. Maybe she’s lived with too many princes. They all drank brandy. Legend has it that the Royals invented the stuff.

“Hey, Nick?”

“Mmmm?” He’s humming the inquiry around the bottle neck as he takes the sip, and Adalind feels pathetic that even this turns her on.

"Sorry, it's just—I've never really lived with a partner before, you know? Not that we're really partners—I don't mean that—but we're sort of partners for Kelly, now, and I guess what I'm trying to say is that you're the first man I've ever lived with—intentionally—and the first cop, so I'm just wondering—is this whole experience, like, working for you?"

He’s watching her intensely across the kitchen island, and Adalind can feel a blush building in her cheeks. Maybe he can tell how much she actually cares about his answer. Maybe he cares, too.

"Yeah,” he says finally. “It's actually working better than I expected. I mean—I lived with Juliette for nearly six years, and this is just really, really different—"

"Of course!” she says. “It must be so weird for you. Living with me—like this—after everything. Plus, you know, the baby."

"It's definitely a change. More so than I ever could have anticipated. But I also think—I don't know. It's been good, Adalind. It's been nice. Living with you is nice."

"Oh." That’s all she can say. She’s stunned.

Nick keeps right on going. "I think Juliette and I were just stuck. We were trying to hold on to that suburban-dream, pre-Grimm life, and it just never fit, you know? I was going to propose, actually. The day you and I met—the day I saw you woge for the first time. I'd just bought a ring. I was ready to commit to Juliette and that normal, kehrseite life we were living. And then I saw your face. And nothing about that old life has made sense ever since."

"I'm sorry for that,” Adalind says with a wince.

"I'm not,” Nick says. “I mean, it hasn't always been fun, and I could have done without losing my mom and Aunt Marie, or Juliette going full evil there, at the end, but it's also been really...freeing. To leave that life behind. To build something new here with you and Kelly. Something custom built for us—a different kind of Grimm and a moderately reformed hexenbiest and our god-knows-what baby. This is our chance to make a better life for ourselves—together, maybe, if we decide we want that. And I think that's good. Nice, even. I think it's a fresh start that we both deserve."

It's a hell of a speech, and in the wake of his words, Adalind finds herself quite speechless. Breathless, even. There's a depth to Nick Burkhardt that she really didn't expect to meet tonight. There's a softness and intention there that makes her heart clench.

"Adalind?" He leaves the kitchen and grips her shoulders, peering into her eyes in the way he does when she's panicking, and he's trying to talk her down. Is she panicking?

_Maybe a little._

"Adalind? Are you okay? Did I upset you?"

"I'm not upset," she says, voice croaking just a bit. "I'm flattered, honestly, that you think I deserve—well, anything, I guess. I'm not even sure I deserve this, and you're the one I've hurt the most, really, over the years."

"Right back at you," he says with a soft smile. Just that small quirk in the corner of his lips that's reserved for her. Like he's trying to conceal just how much he enjoys her company, and he's failing despite all of his best efforts. Adalind loves that smile. She knows how hard-won it is.

"I guess you weren't exactly an innocent bystander," she says, starting to smile herself. "Maybe we do deserve each other, then? For our sins. Karma's a real bitch, isn't she?"

"Yeah. But what she gave me to settle the score was a baby with you."

"Could be worse, then?" she asks, trying to keep the spark of hope that passes through her out of her voice.

"Definitely,” Nick says. “Speaking of which, is it your turn to cook, tonight, or—hey!" She whacks him in the arm. He makes fun of her cooking a lot now, just because she didn’t know how to make rice that one time. It’s not like he did any better with the rice that night, either.

"Shut it, Burkhardt,” she tells him, “or I'll show you just how much rope being moderately reformed gives me."

"I knew it was a mistake when I said it," he says. He doesn't look too sorry about it, though.

***

If seeing Nick smirk during the day is a problem, it’s got nothing on sharing a bed with the man. And they are sharing a bed at this point. It’s a safety precaution, but it’s also an indulgence, because she loves the feel of him beside her. The solid weight of his body—the steady cadence of his breath—the warm smell of him—clean and strong and ever so slightly spiced. He smells like home, and that’s terrifying in the best possible way.

He sleeps more deeply than Adalind expected for such a deadly Grimm. Sure, he can be up and holding his gun within moments at the slightest unexpected noise, but he can also sleep through five successive, prolonged, and involved nightmares in one night and never wake himself up. Adalind had tried to wake him the first night it happened and nearly ended up with a black eye for her troubles. Now when he’s restless, she just reaches out to rest one palm over his heart. It doesn’t wake him, but it seems to calm him down—make the nightmares a little more bearable.

The nightmares make sense, of course. Nick has seen some grisly things as a cop, and as a Grimm, he’s done even more. Every Grimm is a killer at heart, and Adalind understands that better than most. It’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just how they’re made. And what makes Nick unique is how well he manages that innate Grimm nature. How committed he is to doing the right thing whenever possible.

Hexenbiests don’t really go in for moral quandaries, as a rule. Magic doesn’t actually care about right or wrong. It cares about energy. It cares about the will. Ultimately, magic cares about how much you care—how much you want it—how much you are willing to sacrifice to get it. Lawyering is much the same. But in spite of this—or maybe because of it—Adalind is fascinated by Nick’s ironclad sense of right and wrong.

It’s ridiculous, of course. He’s a by-the-book cop with a vigilante calling, and that really shouldn’t be a winning combination. He’s made some terrible decisions over the years (take Diana—oh wait he did), but that’s never stopped him from following his gut, and on the whole, the more Adalind sees of his gut instinct, the more she likes it. It’s honest. It’s fair. It’s constant. It’s like a goddamn fairytale.

And living with him is a crash course in developing her own gut instinct. The one that led her to take the suppressant potion and risk everything for one shot at a future with their baby. The one that led her to name their son Kelly. The one that led her to ask Nick to share her bed.

Nick might be the first person she’s ever met who doesn’t belong to anyone. Adalind has belonged to plenty of people in her life—Sean, her mother, the Royals—whoever was calling the shots and paying her bills, they were her master. That’s how the world works most of the time.

But Nick has no master. As far as Adalind can tell, he let’s Sean pretend to be in control so long as they both know Nick is actually in control, and everyone else doesn’t even bother to pretend. Nick also doesn’t expect to own anyone else. Every time he asks Rosalee for help, it’s a new request with a new opportunity for her to say no. She never does, but he always gives her the choice.

There hasn’t been a lot of choice in Adalind's life. For the most part, her life has been one long succession of evasive maneuvers designed to get her out of the frying pan that inevitably end up with her back in the fire. Again. And again. And again.

But she’s keenly aware now that every day Nick makes a choice. He makes a choice to get up and still keep fighting for the ridiculous things he believes in—like justice and honor and the rule of law, even if he can’t always follow it. He makes a choice to save lives in Portland and find the best solution he possibly can in truly terrible situations. He makes a choice to keep coming home to her and Kelly.

And the fact that he keeps choosing Kelly—keeps choosing her—is almost inspiring. It makes her want to make choices, too. It makes her want to choose him, and, by extension, it makes her want to keep choosing to help his little band of do-gooders. To offer what she’s learned from an otherwise misspent life to aid the mission—which, as far as she can tell, is nothing more or less than keeping the wesen and kehrseite populations of Portland safe from danger or outside influence.

It’s such a silly little goal when she knows first hand that the rest of the world is about to catch on fire. It’s also the hardest thing she’s ever done.

***

Eventually, Trubel finds them. She has a superhero style motorcycle and a life threatening injury, and once Nick leaves to take her to the hospital, Adalind thinks, _yeah, that’s all about right_.

But it’s not just Trubel who finds them. After Trubel comes Meisner, and Adalind is shocked and pleased to see him again.

Of course explaining this to a justifiably paranoid Grimm baby daddy is a bit more of a challenge.

“Nick, I trust him,” Adalind says, and she knows that means something between them. Neither of them trust strangers, and both of their lists of the people they trust are short and concise. It’s pretty much just his friends, not including Sean. They both know better than that.

And when Adalind thinks about it, Meisner may be the only person on Earth outside of their little band of renegades that she does trust. Delivering a baby together will do that for you.

When Nick returns home with Trubel, he has a lot of questions. Chief among them is what is the nature of her relationship with Meisner? He looks pretty Grimm when he asks, and even though she’s shaken from the night they’ve had, she’s still into that look.

 _And is he jealous?_ Adalind kind of hopes that he’s jealous. If she’s going crazy over his damn insistent smirking, the least he can do is be a little jealous when a ruggedly handsome, swashbuckling hero comes back into her life unexpectedly.

Maybe he is jealous, but he’s also panicking a little, so Adalind can’t really draw out the reveal.

“He delivered Diana, Nick,” she says, and he stops pacing and panicking and zeros in completely on her—reaching for her, stroking her hair—and she thinks this is it. This is exactly where she wants to be.

***

It takes twenty-five hours for Trubel to wake up, and when she does she eats everything in the house and most of what they can get for take out at this time of night. Adalind is reminded of that dinner at Bud’s house months ago, when she’d almost cried over Trubel and her lack of a home life that led to her lack of table manners.

It quickly becomes crystal clear that Nick is the big brother that Trubel never had, and he loves her like a sister. It’s pretty sweet to watch them interact—all awkward and unsure but familiar and loving. Adalind leaves them to it and adds an aunt to her running mental list of family for Kelly.

Then Nick gets called out to a horrible string of vandalisms in the wesen business community, which leaves Adalind with nothing to do but to get to know Trubel better.

Trubel is direct as always.

“I know you tried to help Juliette,” she says, “and I know you slept with Nick, which, I guess, is why you’re here.”

It’s certainly a little bracing to hear, so Adalind wraps her hands tighter around her mug of tea and slides down the garage support pole to bring herself more in line with Trubel’s dark eyes. Adalind considers herself an expert on Grimm brooding at this point, but Trubel could teach a master class and even give Nick a run for his money.

“What do you think about Nick?” Trubel asks, and Adalind starts a little, realizing that she had been thinking about Nick and his stupidly beautiful, brooding face. She thinks about it a lot these days.

“What do you mean?”

Trubel shrugs. “Are you, like, in love with him?”

Adalind has never really gone in for talking about boys, and she can guess by the...everything about Trubel that she isn’t usually a fan, either. She’s asking because she cares about Nick, and Adalind gets that. She cares about him, too.

The embarrassing thing is, she doesn't even know when she fell in love with Nick. She'd been too busy lusting after him and settling into the fome and—you know—raising a Grimm-hexenbiest baby to really mark the moment Nick went from being a hot _nuisance_ to being a _hot_ nuisance. One day he was kind of a dick, and the next day he was her partner, and she suspects that neither of them could tell you which precise day of parenthood brought that profound change of circumstances into being.

Well, seeing him hold Kelly for the first time would be a top contender for her. She almost certainly loved him then.

Of course there's another possibility. One that she's been trying to ignore since the moment she saw his bright, goofy smile in the sun outside that coffee shop five years ago.

When did she fall in love with Nick Burkhardt?

_How about at first sight?_

It's ridiculous, of course. This isn't a fairytale; he's not her prince, and witches don't get to have happy endings. But if they did—if he was—if this were a fairytale, Adalind might be brave enough to admit she's been in love with Nick Burkhardt and his dumb face since the first moment their eyes met.

She can’t say any of that to Trubel, though, so she just babbles incoherently until Trubel cuts her off, and they manage to move on to other things until Kelly wakes up from his nap.

_Saved by the baby._

***

The next time Nick comes home, he brings news that rocks her whole world.

Juliette is alive, and Nick is freaking out. Adalind and Kelly are not safe.

Adalind has to talk Nick down first—he’s terrified of losing her and Kelly to HW or Juliette or any other nightmare his cop-brain can conjure up. Later that night he has to return the favor because Adalind is terrified that Juliette is going to take him back.

Nick was with Juliette for the better part of a decade, and a relationship like that doesn’t just end overnight. There’s every chance that a reformed Juliette—or Eve, or whatever her name turns out to be—there’s every chance that the new Juliette could be everything that Nick is looking for.

“Juliette being back doesn’t change how I feel about Kelly or you,” he tells her.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure,” he says, and what choice is there but to believe him?

***

That gets a little easier the next morning when they finally kiss. It’s so simple, Adalind feels a little silly about how much she enjoys it.

It’s just nice. It’s nice to feel his warmth against her. It’s nice to feel the rasp of his stubble against her palm and smell the spice of his aftershave and taste the tang of fresh brewed coffee on his lips.

It’s also nice to talk about her fears. The way she worries that one day he’ll realize he never wanted any of this with her, and he’ll just go. The way that she regrets their origins and worries that one day he’ll decide he can’t forgive her for her past, and he’ll tell her to go. Basically she worries about anything that might separate them. Anything that might tear them apart. Because she loves him, and she wants this. She wants him. And she’d do anything to keep him, including waiting to kiss him again until he’s ready to give their relationship a proper chance.

***

Eventually, things start to suck less. Life returns to some semblance of normal: Nick back to solving quirky, but ultimately self-contained cases; Trubel back to god-knows-where, and Adalind and Kelly back to a routine of nap time and baby Einstein and never ending laundry that has her fantasizing about being a lawyer again and getting to clean up other people’s messes for money instead of love. Not that she’s not happy about the love part, but still, the pay is shit.

There’s no rush though, and she entertains herself for now by planning a dinner for the crew in the fome. It’s a house warming of sorts, too, because even though it’s been months, Nick hasn’t let anyone visit before. It took a whole lot of laundry to convince him to let her throw the party, but it was worth it because now everyone is gathered around their table—her new found family and friends who have done so much to help her reach this moment of peace and safety—and she gets to thank them all for being there for her when they had no reason to be. For being her friend now, even though no one can predict what the future might hold once her suppressant wears off.

It’s hard to get all of that out of her mouth, but Nick helps. The evening ends with everyone laughing and talking over each other at the table, and _this_ , Adalind thinks, _really is the start of a beautiful friendship_.

***

The day comes when Adalind finds herself in a moment alone with Hank. It was bound to happen, of course. He is Nick’s partner, and she is Nick’s...other partner. They were always going to cross paths and now that Hank knows where the loft is, he stops by more often to pick up Nick or discuss a case.

Nick is still in the shower on one such occasion, so Adalind finds herself making Hank coffee and sitting with him on the couch—thinking about how to say sorry without making it even more awkward between them.

Hank saves her the trouble.

“You and Nick,” he says, meeting her eyes over his mug, “I think you’re really good together, Adalind.”

Adalind smiles at him. She can’t help it.

“Thank you. I really appreciate that. And I wanted to say that I’m sorry—for everything I’ve done to you. I know that it can’t fix everything, but I wanted to say it. I needed to say it to you.”

“Thank you,” Hank says, and it’s not that it’s the end of the conversation, it’s just that it’s the end for right now. Hank doesn’t need to forgive her today. He may never forgive her, and that would be fair. But she can start by acknowledging her wrongs and owning her mistakes, and she can let Hank set the pace from there.

***

Of course the peace doesn’t last. She’s living with a Grimm after all, and soon enough he’s being called to a new wild goose chase in Germany of all places. Adalind doesn’t like him traveling so close to the Royal’s sphere of influence (she hears Viktor’s in charge now, which is just horrifying), and in general, she doesn’t like sleeping without him or thinking about what happens if he gets sucked into the same wild-goose key-chase that almost killed her and any chance of their relationship five and a half years ago.

“I know I can’t stop you from going,” she tells him. “It’s something you have to do. But I also know there’s a chance that you won’t come back—”

“Adalind—”

His eyes are so intense right now—hot and piercing—and at this exact moment she is officially done waiting for him to realize that they belong together. She is done waiting for him to make the first move. She is Adalind Schade, and she waits for no man to give her what she wants.

“I can’t let you go without you knowing how I feel about you.”

She kisses him then—soft and sweet and intentional—once, twice—and then she pulls back to look into his searching eyes and find him there, right where she needs him to be.

“I don’t care if this is a mistake,” she tells him. “I love you.”

It takes a few more kisses and then he’s there with her, stripping off his shirt and reaching out to help remove hers. He lifts her on to the bed, and Adalind pulls him down with her.

It’s even better than she remembers. Being in her own body with Nick above her—surrounding her—inside of her—it’s pure, unadulterated magic. The way he moves, the way he feels—the way he treats her gently, like she’s liable to break even though he’s seen her survive countless near death experiences before. It feels good to go slow like this—to breathe him in and enjoy him fully. His body is remarkable—it fits against hers perfectly, and she feels safer in his arms than she ever has before.

But she gets bored with safe. Bored is the wrong word. She loves feeling safe with him. It’s a hard won privilege, and she’s grateful for it every single day.

She’s also been desperately thinking about him throwing her around a bit in this bed for months, and now that she's gotten him here, she sets out to encourage him to do just that.

Preliminary discovery reveals that Nicholas Burkhardt quite likes a hickey. She sucks one into the place where his shoulder meets his neck, and he makes this noise for her—something between a keen and a moan, and _yes_ , she thinks, _I’m having that_.

She intends to expand her exploration to cover his whole body, but Nick beats her to it. In the year since Monroe and Rosalee’s wedding, she has not forgot a single detail about what Nick’s glorious mouth can do, but she’s still blown away all over again as he gets to work in earnest taking her apart with his tongue and fingers until she’s a broken, wailing mess, and he has to slip his fingers in her mouth just to keep her from waking up Kelly in the crib across the room.

 _It’s fine_ , she thinks. It’s all fine. It’s so fine, for example, when Nick finally slides into her—hot and hard and perfect—and starts a rhythm that drives her wild and makes her arch up into him—meeting every thrust, matching every moan.

“Please, Nick,” she says—because it’s so good, and she can’t wait another second, and she doesn’t have to because he has one hand on her ass, pulling her in tight, and the other on her clit—chasing her orgasm in mind bending little circles that push her up and over the edge and take him right along with her.

Afterward, she’s pretty sure the world actually moved. Actually, she’s pretty sure she’s been reborn. Is that something a life changing orgasm with the man you love can do? _They should really look into that_ , she thinks. And then she stops thinking because they’re ready to start again, and that’s just magic.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience, folks! November was wild, so here's to a calmer December and more Nick and Adalind goodness.

_Once upon a time, there was a determined witch ready to fight for her happy ending..._

***

Life without Nick sucks. She doesn’t have a more nuanced way of thinking about it than that. She misses his smirking, and she misses his kisses, and she even misses the brooding and the obsession with getting the laundry done. She misses him, in every possible way, and it’s been two days.

Her mother would hate this for her. Sean would laugh at her. Even her old self—just months ago—would slap her current self and tell her to snap out of it.

Adalind Schade does not pine. Not for anyone, and certainly not for any man. And the sooner her man gets home, the sooner she can remember that and stop mooning around the loft.

Eventually, she heads to the spice shop to take her mind off the missing and the mooning. Rosalee must know that, but she very kindly doesn’t point it out. Instead she lets Adalind set up a nap area for Kelly in the back and puts her to work restocking the shelves. In this Adalind feels useful. All that herbology her mother drilled into her during homeschool is finally paying off, and she spends the afternoon going up and down the ladder, shelving new products and thinking about how she’s blissfully not thinking about Nick anymore.

Except that she’s totally still thinking about Nick, and Rosalee is still thinking about Monroe, and, every once in a while, they just put down the jars in their hands, look at each other and sigh.

“Tea,” Rosalee says.

“Wine,” says Adalind. “But I’m breastfeeding, and I don’t have a bottle on me, so sure, tea.”

Rosalee really does make the best tea, and they pass the day like this, mostly in silence and shared worry. It’s no different, really, to sitting alone and pining at the loft, but Rosalee’s quiet company does make it better. How is anyone’s guess, but she does.

At the end of the day, things take a turn for the worse. It turns out even Rosalee has an asshole ex—Tony—and when he gets violent, Adalind’s hexenbiest powers surface again with a vengeance.

The resulting panic attack is a little unexpected. In some quiet corner of her mind, she can almost imagine trying to tell her younger, newly powerless self that there might be a day when the thought of her powers returning would be just as abhorrent as the thought of losing them once was.

But the real panic she’s feeling is about Nick. About losing Nick—just now—just when they’re finally starting to make this entire mess of pain and hurt between them worth it. Just after she told him that she loves him—just when he trusted her enough to hold her to him—naked and vulnerable and there. If she loses him now…

She can’t lose him now.

But after breaking Tony’s hand, nothing goes right. Nick comes home, and he’s distant again—in his head a lot more. The sex is nothing like before he left—if they bother having sex at all—and out of bed he’s pulling away. Maybe she is, too. Because it’s scary out here in the world with her heart on the line again, and Nick doesn’t seem to be ready to trust her with his.

Not that she blames him. Maybe this really is karma. Maybe the penance for her sins is to love the one man in the world who can never love her because of everything she’s already done. And if he can’t love her without her powers, she’s absolutely sure that finding out they’re back would only exacerbate the situation, so she stays quiet. Gets watchful. Gets wary.

And then who should call? Sean fucking Renard.

Whenever she thinks things can’t get worse, there he is. _Such a prince._

But he says he knows how to get Diana back, and that has to be worth the risk of whatever other nonsense he’ll try to throw her way. For better and mostly for worse, they share a daughter who’s missing and who desperately needs them. She’s been side tracked for months—learning how to be a mother all over again with Kelly—but now her baby boy is safe and her little girl is still in danger. There’s no choice, she’ll have to talk to Sean.

Sean is as charming as ever, which is to say he tries to be charming, and that makes her skin crawl and sets off all her alarm bells. Sean trying to charm her means that he wants something, and Adalind knows he cares about their daughter, but she doubts that Diana is his primary motivation. That would be far too domestic for him. Somewhere behind Diana must be his latest power grab.

It would be a relief to talk to Nick about it. It would be a relief to talk to Nick about anything. Diana, Sean, whatever secret Nick’s been protecting since he got back from Germany—the powers she’s recovered and the threat that they pose to their entire new life together.

So many things to talk about, and none of them good. So she doesn’t talk about them—they don’t talk about anything—and then she goes back to work as a hexenbiest lawyer—just to get out of the house and not talk to someone else for a change—but nothing gets better.

Sean’s still being weird; Nick’s still being distant; Kelly’s still delightful, but Diana’s still missing, and every morning Adalind looks in the mirror and moves her toothbrush with her mind and confirms that yep, she’s still a damn hexenbiest and nothing ever changes.

She finally seduces Nick just for a break from the gloom. They haven’t been together much since the night before he left for Germany, and after two glasses of wine and a stack of boring briefs, she decides that it’s really a shame that she lives with a stupidly hot man, and she hasn’t seen him naked in weeks.

Nick is woefully easy to convince. One cheesy line and one hot kiss, and he trails after her into the bedroom with dark, dangerous eyes that tell her he’s all Grimm tonight.

It’s fantastic, the way he watches her shimmy out of her leggings, the way his eyes follow her every movement—a natural born predator—but tonight she doesn’t feel like prey. Tonight—climbing into his lap, kissing him with all the power she’s been holding back for weeks, feeling his strong, lovely fingers stroke the flame within her into a roaring fire—tonight, she feels like a witch.

She takes him on his back. She’s so ready for it, she might even move him there with her magic, and she can only hope he’s too turned on to notice. He certainly doesn’t seem to mind—not when she takes him in with one full stroke and rides him hard, focusing everything she has on that point of connection where he is hers, and she is his, and they—just for this moment—belong to each other without a single reservation.

***

After that, she can’t hide anymore. She loves Nick. She trusts Nick, and even if he doesn’t love or trust her, he needs to know who he’s living with. She tells him about Sean. She tells him about Diana. And then she gets kidnapped and finally, finally gets to see Diana.

Her little girl is so grown up and powerful and, honestly, more than a little terrifying. A proper little Schade. Her grandmother would be so proud, and Adalind is so worried. Because she can already sense her options narrowing. She can already feel the moment coming—the way it’s always been coming—when she’ll have to choose between what’s best for her daughter and what’s best for Nick.

When she tells him her powers are back, he already knows. He’s quiet and calm, and he promises that he would never hurt her. She really hopes he means that, because when Bonaparte finds her and threatens Nick and Kelly if she doesn’t comply, well—

She really hopes Nick doesn’t kill her once and for all this time.

***

The less said about living with Sean and Bonaparte, the better. The only saving grace of the whole situation is finally getting to see Diana every day. The tantalizing chance to raise her daughter and protect Kelly are the only things holding her together. If she thinks about Nick she’d have to kill someone, and then he'd probably have to arrest her again, and the only appealing thing about that is at least she’d get to see his stupid face before he locked her away for good.

It’s a pathetic thought, but then life in the mansion is also a bit pathetic. Black Claw doesn’t seem to have a need for her beyond keeping Diana happy and serving as Sean’s arm candy. It’s such a waste of her talents, she’s almost miffed, but then she thinks about all the things that they could make her do to Nick and Rosalee and the rest of the team, and she’s glad her captors seem to think she’s mostly decorative. The last six years of her life are littered with the defeats of useless men who thought she was a pawn in their political machinations. If they think she’s done fighting, then they deserve everything they are going to get.

In the end, even she couldn’t have anticipated the way that Diana makes them pay. After warning Nick his location has been betrayed, Diana goes a step further. She possesses Sean and kills Bonaparte. Her baby is all grown up and killing her own monsters, and Adalind just hopes it’s not too late to teach her a little discretion when it comes to bloodshed.

If not, then her teenage years should be fun.

But once Bonaparte is dead, Adalind doesn’t wait. She needs Nick, and she’s not shy about telling him. She doesn’t even know if he’ll come when she calls him, but when he bursts through the front door less than twenty minutes later, she realizes he must have missed her just as much as she missed him.

He kisses her like he’s memorizing her mouth just in case he loses her again. He kisses her like he’ll never stop, and Adalind doesn’t care anymore about anything but leaving this expensive hellhole and climbing back into Nick’s cheap, sturdy bed and never leaving him ever again.

He fucks her against the dressing room archway instead, and it’s the best thing that’s happened to her since the last time she fucked him, just before she told him about Diana and her powers. She’s starting to think that it’s a real shame that the times they’ve made love to each other are so few and far between that she can catalog the periods of their life together by their most memorable fucks.

That needs to change. She wants to go home and fuck him so often that she can’t keep them all straight anymore. So often that it becomes commonplace and normal, but never boring, because how could it ever be boring when she loves him like this?

***

Nick is on the run after that. Sean’s trying to eliminate the competition once and for all, and he plans to kill Nick with the full force of the Portland PD behind him. It’s maddening to be stuck sharing a house with Sean while he’s out there trying to murder the man she loves. She’s tempted to kill Sean herself, but there’s Diana to think about. Diana loves her father, and she deserves to have him in her life, as much as she might be better off without him. Killing Sean might just make him a martyr to their daughter, and all his lust for power and glory might become her passions, too, despite all of Adalind’s best efforts.

So she doesn’t kill Sean. Instead she focuses her energy on figuring out how to raise Diana well enough that when she has to choose how to wield her power, she’ll choose to help the world rather than subjugate it. There’s a long view here that Adalind has never had the time to think about before. A future world in which her daughter just might be the most powerful hexenbiest to ever live, as well as the most powerful Royal heir. What does that future look like if her little girl doesn’t start learning how to manage her powers and her temper? Diana’s already killed two people without a blink, and she hasn’t even hit puberty yet. Helping Diana figure out the kind of witch Queen she wants to be is going to be Adalind's life’s purpose from here on out.

And that starts with Adalind. She’s done a lot of things she’s not proud of in her life. She’s done more things that she shouldn’t be proud of, but she still sort of is. She’s done spells that had some very unpleasant, unintended consequences, and she’s done spells that had awful consequences that she sure as hell intended. And all of that stops today.

Which is not to say she’s giving up her magic, because if she’s going to raise the best witch in the world, Adalind’s going to have to be the second best witch in the world and the best mother, besides, and that is going to take all of her considerable talents and education. It’s funny, somehow, that after all that time her own mother spent grooming Adalind to be the perfect witch and the ideal Queen, her granddaughter will be the one to actually benefit from her instruction. Magic aside, Catherine Schade also had something to offer her daughter on the subject of being a good mother. Whenever Adalind doesn’t know what to do, she thinks about what her mother would have done, and does exactly the opposite.

She’s at the precinct when Nick calls. She just finished telling Sean Renard that no, she doesn’t feel like perjuring herself for him, but when Nick asks her, she’s more than ready to help. She’s a little surprised by the request for a trust-me-knot. They’ve been together in some capacity for nearly a year now, and this might be the first time he’s asked her for magical assistance since she volunteered the hexenbiest suppressant for Juliette. There’s a reason he’s calling her—he needs her to alibi Sean to make this plan work—but he’s also trusting her in a way he never has before.

He trusts her to help him—to use her magic for something other than hurting him and the people he cares about—and just like that, she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the life she wants. She wants to be his partner, in life and in Grimm, Inc. in Portland. She wants to help the group—Rosalee and Monroe, Hank and Wu, Trubel and Bud, and—oh dear lord—even Eve. She’s ready to deal with Eve for the rest of her life if it means she gets to be with Nick. And above all that, she wants to be a witch. The best witch Portland has ever seen until her daughter grows up and rightfully usurps the title.

Nick practically jumps Adalind when she gets to the loft. The elevator shutters to a stop on the top floor, and the manual door flies up without her lifting a finger. He’s dark and stubly, and he smells like sweat and blood and the sex they had two days ago, so she guesses he hasn’t had time to shower while he’s been on the lam. She doesn’t care—he’s the best thing she’s ever seen, and he’s kissing her like it’s been twenty years instead of a couple days.

“I missed you,” he says now, pulling her out of the elevator and dragging her towards the bedroom where he pulls off her coat. “If we had time, I’d have you right here.”

"Here" turns out to be the barn door on their bedroom. The bed is looking a little worse for wear, what with all the bullet holes and the blood spatter, so Nick just presses her up against the door and kisses her again—deep and searching—and Adalind stops worrying about Sean walking in or the kids behaving for Rosalee and melts into him, ready to get started on having so much sex with this man that it becomes completely, deliciously ordinary.

They don’t actually manage to fuck against the door, although it’s not for a lack of effort on Adalind’s part. He’s already got one hand down her jeans when she reaches for his fly, but he brushes her hand away.

“I just want you,” he says. “I just want to feel you.”

His fingers are magic, and he must feel everything—the way she shivers while he nips her ear, the way she shakes when he strokes her clit, the way she convulses and comes when he fills her with his fingers and presses deep, whispering, “Yes, like that. God, Adalind, just like that.”

He’s washing his hands when the guys walk in. Hank, Wu, and Sean. She can hear them in the other room while she spells a windowpane to act as mirror so she can assess the damage her dumb boyfriend did to her hair. Actually, her hair looks great—perfectly blown and curled by his heat—but there’s a hickey right where her shoulder meets her neck that’s going to take some hiding. She could do with a healing spell, but she doesn’t have the herbs, so she just grabs her coat and hopes her entrance is dramatic enough to conceal the delightful bruise growing under her skin.

It seems to do the trick. Sean is too pissed off about being forced to help Nick that he doesn’t notice, and Hank is laser focused on Sean, making sure he doesn’t twitch one muscle in the wrong direction. Only Wu is looking at her, and if he winks, well, Wu always has been the smartest cookie in the room.

When she gets down to witchcraft, she doesn’t look at anyone. She can’t bear to look at Nick with her hexenbiest face—all desiccated like a corpse—and see him flinch.

" _You find that attractive?”_ he’d asked Sean once. _"Really?"_

She doesn’t want to see that in his eyes again—not when she can still feel his fingers inside of her, his breath against her ear, his hair soft against her palms. She loves him, and she can’t bear to look at him with her true face and know he doesn’t feel the same.

After the spell is done, Hank and Wu take Sean away. Nick and Adalind wait for them to clear the building before they take the elevator down.

“I wish you didn’t have to see that,” she says, whispering over the whir of the lift mechanism.

“What?”

“My face. I know you hate it. I wish you didn’t have to look at it, just now.”

The elevator stops, but neither of them move. Nick’s just staring at her—killer dark eyes boring into hers—and then she looks away and tries not to cry.

“I don’t hate your face,” he says quietly. Carefully. “I’ve seen a lot of hexenbiests now—more than should be survivable really, but yours is the only one that makes me smile.”

Oh god. He’s being nice. Adalind thinks nearly anything would have been easier than Nick trying to let her down nicely.

“Nick—you don’t have to—”

“No,” he says, loudly now. Voice strong and commanding. “Look at me Adalind.”

She can’t resist him. She’ll probably never be able to resist him again, the bastard, so she looks to him and his eyes catch her. Hold her tight.

“Woge,” he says. “Please.”

She does. She doesn’t know if it’s from fear or love or spite, but she woges and stares into his jet black, dead eyes and thinks, _well, it was nice while it lasted_.

“You are incredible,” he says, leaning in, brushing her silver hair away from her desiccated cheek—stroking it even. Smiling. “You’re death personified, but you have given so much life to my world. Kelly. Diana. Us. You are worth it. All of it—all the death and the pain I’ve caused—all the bad decisions I’ve made—all the people I’ve let down. That was my whole life before you gave me Kelly. Before you gave me your love. It sucked, Adalind. Everything from the moment I met you until the moment I had a baby with you sucked. But you are magical. You changed my life, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

He kisses her then. She doesn’t even know if she’s still woged when she kisses him back. Maybe it doesn’t even matter. He knows her better than anyone, and here he is, kissing her anyway.

***

She doesn’t get to go home with him that night, but eventually Nick beats Sean at his own game, and she gets to leave the prince and his godforsaken castle behind once and for all.

“I thought I was going to go crazy without you,” Nick says, when they’re finally all back at the loft. Kelly is in his crib, and Diana is in the cot, and someone really did their best to bleach the floors clean of all the blood from that time Nick and Diana massacred Bonaparte and his men. Diana can still sense their deaths, but it might be weirder if she couldn’t, so here they are. Home sweet home.

“I’m sorry for leaving,” she says. It’s not the first time she’s apologized, and it won’t be the last. She still doubts sometimes that Nick wants to be with her and live with her as more than just Kelly’s mom. Those doubts lurk within her, swimming underneath and surfacing at the worst moments. But everything she’s seen from Nick since she called him to the mansion has spoken to her of a man desperate to get his family back. A family that very much includes her. It makes it harder, in some ways, to forgive herself for leaving him.

“I appreciate that,” he says. “Finding you and Kelly gone—well, that was one of the worst days of my life. But I think it worked out. If I had to protect you and Kelly in that firefight—I don’t want to think about it. I’m glad you were somewhere safe, with Kelly and Diana. I’m glad you were in a position to warn me when things went sideways. And I’m really, really glad that Bonaparte is dead and can’t hurt you anymore.”

“Yeah,” she says. The ring on her finger catches the soft light from the bulb over the sink and sparkles where her hand rests in his on the island. “Except for this hunk of junk.”

Nick laughs—not a happy sound, but a welcome one. A little huff of a chuckle that tells her that they are going to be all right. “Not your taste, huh?”

“Well, diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but you know what? I think I’ve gone off them.”

“Noted,” Nick says, pulling her in for a kiss before she gets a chance to think that one through.

Living with Nick again is a bit like a fairytale. One of the ones where everyone is crammed into a tiny cottage and the real miracle is how everyone manages to eat, wash, and sleep in such a confined living space. Also, she gets to wake up next to the man she loves everyday. That’s also pretty magical.

Of course, they still have to co-parent Diana with Sean, and the fairytales never mentioned what a pain in the ass sharing custody with a prince would be. There are no hurt feelings between Adalind and Sean, surprisingly. They're both too practical and mercenary for that. That used to be the most attractive thing about him—their similarities. Ruthless magic and a lust for power. Thank the gods she's had a chance to grow up. Nick gave her that when he took her powers all those years ago—as awful and painful as it was. He gave her a chance to be more than she was—a mother, a fighter, and a better witch. His blood is her blood now; his children are her children.

So more than anything, she’s grateful to Sean. For not being her prince. For betraying her and setting her free from him and her mother and all the things she grew up thinking were important until she had Diana and realized that there are many things in this world more precious than a crown. Still, every time Diana comes home from her father’s, they have to have another chat about using her powers for good and not just because she wants another cookie from the top shelf. That’s when Adalind forgets that she’s grateful for Sean and just curses him under her breath once Diana goes to bed while Nick laughs and wisely does not comment.

And then, there’s Eve.

Diana is the one to tell her that Eve is in the tunnel. They’d been talking about Meisner—the man, the myth, the legend. It hurts, thinking about Meisner dying while she wasn’t there to save him the way he once saved her. Without him she might have died in that forest years ago. She might never have come back to Portland. She might never have slept with Nick that first time, and they may never have become the family they are now. She owes Meisner a lot, and she regrets not being able to thank him properly the last time they met.

But then Diana tells her about Eve, and Adalind has much bigger problems to deal with than the memory of Meisner. Eve is bloody and bruised—dehydrated, starved, and sleep deprived. Without Diana, they may well have found her mummy down here in a month’s time. The tunnel is certainly starting to look like it might belong to an Egyptian tomb. The walls are covered in symbols, carved into the stone at the cost of Eve's torn up hands. Diana illuminates them all, and whatever is going on between Eve and her daughter and the freaky symbols they can’t stop drawing, Adalind doesn’t like it one bit.

Later, after Eve has eaten and rested, and Nick has given her the third degree and disappeared again, Adalind sits at the dining table with Eve and thinks about her options. There's a choice here, Adalind knows. No one would fault her for sending Eve on her way—far away from the kids and Nick and Adalind herself—all people she's hurt or tried to kill in the all too recent past. Adalind could kick her out, here and now. Write her off as broken—unfixable—irredeemable—and not a single person would fault her. Not Nick, not Rosalee, certainly not Trubel, Hank, Wu, or Monroe. Eve and the specter of Juliette lurking behind her dark, shadowed eyes could be gone today, maybe for good, and Nick might even thank Adalind for it.

But Adalind meets Juliette's eyes—and they are too pained not to be Juliette's eyes—and all she feels is some kind of kinship. Adalind has been the witch on the run—out of allies and options—port-less in Portland. Adalind has done unforgivable things—has been irredeemable.

She remembers one terrible night, not so very long ago, when she'd come to Nick and Juliette and begged for their help to find Diana. She remembers the help that never came—not then—and she wonders what might have happened if they'd all made different choices that night. If they hadn't turned her away. If she hadn't felt the need to turn back to the Royals once again. Maybe things would be different. Maybe she wouldn't have had to seduce Nick that first time. Maybe he wouldn't have lost his powers, and maybe Juliette wouldn't have become a hexenbiest and tried to kill them all. Maybe Nick and Juliette would be married by now, with their own kids. Maybe they are in some other world where they showed kindness to a new mother out of her mind with grief on that one night.

 _That's the problem with kindness_ , Adalind thinks. You never know what future problem it's going to solve. If it works, you'll never know. She has no regrets now, on the other side of all that trauma. She has Kelly and Diana and Nick, and she wouldn't trade what they have now for anything. But they have this joy at the expense of Juliette's suburban dreams, and maybe that was a good thing for Juliette. Maybe she needed to be more of a witch. But the pain between them stops here. Today.

It stops like this:

"You can stay with us," Adalind says. "As long as you need."

"Oh—no—I couldn't—"

"Juliette," Adalind says, one hand on the other witch's shoulder while she looks deep into troubled, hazel eyes. "Eve. I know it's weird. It might never be not weird between us, I know that. I'm not crazy. But you need help, and we can do that for you. We can help you stay grounded while you figure the rest out. You're not the first hexenbiest to go off the deep end and have to claw her way back. I've done it twice. It sucks, but it's not the end of the world, and it's certainly not the end of your life. You're a badass. A real fucking superhero. And someday, all this will just be your origin story, I promise."

"You can't know that," Eve says, and Adalind nods.

"You're right," she says. "The only one who gets to decide that is you."

Nick is a little harder to convince. After all this time, he's pretty used to living with witches, but living with his ex again turns out to be much more of a trial for him.

"I know this sounds petty," he says one night a week later up on the roof, "but the thing I think I hate the most is seeing her hair on the tile in the shower."

He's pressed against Adalind's back, one hand wrapped around her waist and the other hand braced against the wall overlooking the city. They came to the roof for a little bit of privacy, since the loft below is full of children and Eve, who sometimes seems like a child while she's figuring out how to rebuild herself from the ashes of unbridled magic, power, and whatever the hell Hadrian’s Wall did to her in the name of democracy, or whatever.

"Really?" Adalind says. "It's the hair and not the fact that she's tried to kill us all a couple times?"

"Nah," Nick says. "You've tried to kill me way more times than her, but you never leave your hair on the bathroom tile for me to clean up. She always has. Seven years I cleaned up that woman's hair, and I'm fucking sick of it."

Adalind can't help the giggle that escapes her. _It really is the little things_ , she thinks. Hexes and curses and unexpected babies barely gave this man pause, but brunette hair in his shower is his kryptonite.

"Be kind," she says, turning to kiss his cheek. "I'm sure we do things that drive her crazy, too. And we'll probably do things that drive each other crazy, sooner rather than later."

"You're right." Nick sighs heavily and presses his forehead to hers. "When did you get to be the voice of reason in this family?"

"Sometime after I stopped trying to kill you," she says, and he laughs—pure and joyful—and she thinks that none of this should be possible, really, but here they are. Laughing at their worst mistakes.

"Promise me one thing?" she asks.

"Anything."

"Promise me you'll tell me when I do something that drives you crazy. Don't wait seven years with me—just tell me and let us fight it out like the killers we really are, hmmm?"

Nick pulls back and blinks at her. "You want to fight?"

"For you?” she says. "Always. Every day you'll let me."

"Oh," he says, leaning in for another, welcome kiss. "Yeah. I get that."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for sticking with this story! I hope you enjoy it so far! Final chapter coming soon.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "final" chapter ended up being almost 10,000 words, so it is now two chapters with twice as much Nadalind content as anticipated. The final-final chapter is coming soon, but I hope you enjoy this one!

_Once upon a time, the world—inexplicably—did not end…_

***

Inviting Eve to stay was a great idea in theory. A growth opportunity. A chance to take the high road and build character and all that nonsense that in practice is turning Adalind into something of a paranoid girlfriend.

It's not anyone's fault—Nick is clearly uncomfortable with Eve around the place, and Eve looks miserable all of the time—and yet, there's still something there between them. Awkward silences—furtive glances—an eggshell atmosphere that's grating heavily on everyone's nerves. Even Diana can sense it—or maybe especially Diana can sense it—and when even Diana starts asking Eve if she wants Nick back, Adalind takes it as a sign that she might just be living on borrowed time.

But first there's Monroe's birthday weekend, and Adalind is determined to make the most of her time with Nick away from the loft. Once they set foot in the hotel she can feel her best smile settle on her face. It's a mask, of course, but not an unwelcome one. If her time riding shotgun with this group of extraordinary, loving people is running short, then she wants to enjoy it. She wants to laugh at their silly stories and share a decadent meal and love Nick, all night long.

The next day is a little less enjoyable—what with Nick chasing after Rosalee, and Monroe suddenly becoming the center of Adalind's world, and Eve explicitly pining after Nick, and the cat fight that ensues. When the spell breaks, Adalind woges back immediately, horrified to realize she'd been seconds away from snapping Eve's neck. Nick rushes to her, and the way he holds her close and fervently whispers her name almost let's her forget the things Eve said while under the spell.

Almost.

Later that night, Nick can't stop apologizing for chasing after Rosalee all day, as if he would stand a chance with Rosalee even if Monroe weren't in the picture. Adalind is not worried about Rosalee in the least, and she certainly isn't worried about whatever Nick gets up to while under a spell. It's not cheating if the magic made you do it. That's like rule one of love spells.

She also has to remind herself that it's not cheating if it's just weird between your partner and their ex. That's normal, and that's why exes don’t live together, not when there's a new partner and kids involved. That's not to say that it couldn't work with the right people, but it's becoming very clear to Adalind that, as a unit, they are not the right people.

Eve must have the same thought, because shortly after Monroe's birthday, she moves out. Nick comes home late one night from the spice shop and tells Adalind that Eve elected to stay behind.

"That's good, right?" Adalind asks, but Nick just shrugs.

"It doesn't feel good," he says. "I'm worried about her."

The next day Monroe and Rosalee find Eve bloody and unconscious at the shop, and Nick calls to say he'll be spending the day at the hospital. At Eve's bedside.

It turns out to be one of the scariest days of Adalind’s life, and that really is saying something. She’s spent weeks in Royal torture cells and literally on the run for her life, but knowing Eve is in the hospital with Nick at her side is worse than all of that. The Royals could only kill her—Nick could leave her tomorrow and break her heart.

She wants to fight for him—fight for them—but there's nothing to fight. Of course it's tempting to go off the deep end. To reach for her mother’s books and hex Eve or cast a love spell on Nick or just do something to make him come home to her and stay there.

But she can't. _Maybe that's what love really is_ , she thinks. Not wanting to hurt the person you love, even when they're hurting you.

He may well leave her. Eve is becoming more like Juliette every day, and if there ever was a storybook princess in Portland, it was Juliette. Maybe Nick is her prince, and maybe Adalind has only ever been the witch who separated him from his one true love. Maybe this is how their story ends. Juliette wakes with a kiss, and Adalind dies alone, brokenhearted.

 _Except I won’t die without Nick_ , Adalind thinks. She can feel a strange sense of calm rising up within her—up from the base of her spine—up into her belly—up through her solar plexus—up to her heart, where its roots dig deep and bloom like a rose.

Nick will not be the end of her.

If he leaves, she will grieve. She will cry. She will miss him like hell. But loving Nick has made it easier to learn how to love herself, and that’s not going away anytime soon. Nick may leave, but the peace she’s found in being his partner and raising their kids is hers, and he doesn’t get to take it with him. She’s survived a score of men who thought that she would fail without them, and not one of them has ever brought her so low that she couldn’t fight her way back. Surviving Nick will be harder than all of them, but it will also be her greatest achievement. _I loved and lost Nicholas Burkhardt_ , she’ll say to the next prince she meets. _What could you possibly do to me that could be worse than that?_

So when Nick finally comes home from the hospital, Adalind is already mentally packing. She doesn’t know where she’s going. Maybe to Monroe and Rosalee’s to start, just until she figures out where to live with Kelly and Diana. She’ll need her own place by the time the triplets arrive, and it would be good to stay in Portland so the kids can see their dads. She’ll have to take that partnership the firm offered her. They only wanted her as a partner because she came with a Grimm in tow, but the offer is still there, and she could grab it before they're any the wiser about her relationship status. It won’t be fun—she was looking forward to not working for Evil, Inc. anymore—but hey, a girl’s got to eat and so do her children.

The look on Nick’s face when he arrives at the loft is not exactly reassuring. He looks...grim, and not in the usual, sexy way. It’s late when he walks in and goes straight for the fridge, opening a beer and taking one big gulp. It doesn’t take an emotional genius to read the room—he’s not happy—and Adalind sighs at the table and goes back to folding laundry, glad that the kids are tucked away for this—Kelly in the crib and Diana at Sean’s for the night.

“When do you want us out?” she asks. Because she might be a bitch, but she’s also practical. There’s no sense in throwing a tantrum until the details are ironed out. She’d like to know the scope of the pain before she completely breaks down.

“What?” Nick’s eyebrows are doing that furrowing thing again, and Adalind has to remind herself that it’s not cute, really, and she doesn’t need to kiss his brow and smooth that little furrow away.

“You’re going back to Juliette, right? When do the kids and I need to leave?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look,” Adalind says, putting down the laundry and resting her palms against the cool metal of the table. It’s strong beneath her—grounding—but metal is flexible, too. It bends. It conducts. It’s everything she will need to be to get out of this conversation without trying to kill the man she loves when he finally fesses up to leaving her.

“Look,” she says again. “I’m really trying not to be a bitch about this, Nick. I know you’ve been at Eve's side all day, and I get it. She’s more like Juliette than she’s ever been, and that’s wonderful for you both. I won’t stand in the way, and I am really, really trying not to go old school me about this. But I need you to tell me the truth. If the kids and I need to move, we’ve got all sorts of stuff that needs to be figured out. Just tell me so we can do that before I start to lose control.”

Nick stands in the kitchen with the beer bottle half way to his open mouth, frozen. The furrow between his brows is gone now, and he’s just staring at her with wide eyes, like Diana caught levitating the cookies again.

The beer bottle lowers, slowly, and then he leaves it on the island and comes to stand beside her. She has to crane her neck to see his face, and the look he’s giving her is dark and brooding. Maybe even dangerous.

“You’re being very reasonable about this,” he says, and Adalind’s breath catches, because damn it all, she was right. “What happened to the Adalind who would hex me and Eve and half of Portland to get what she wanted and keep it?”

“She had kids,” Adalind says, feeling the tears well up, “and she had to grow up. I can’t make the rest of it right, Nick. I can’t take away all the things I’ve done to you and Juliette, but I can do this. I can leave and let you get back to your life together.”

“Right,” he says. “The suburban dream.”

And then: “Fuck that.”

He’s kneeling beside her now, reaching for her hands and pulling her down, off the chair, on to the floor, and into his lap.

“I'm not going back to Juliette,” he says, rocking her gently and whispering into her hair while she gives in and starts to cry. “There is no world in which me and Juliette work, Adalind. You have to know that. I can’t stand her hair in the shower, and she got my mother killed, and Eve is straight up terrifying—and that’s me saying that. You’re the one I want to be with, Adalind. I thought you knew that.”

“How?” Adalind asks. It’s more of a gasp, what with the tears and the air that’s completely escaping her just now. “How would I possibly know that? You’ve never promised me anything. Not about the two of us. You’ve never said you love me.”

“I know,” he says. “I’m not going to say it now, either, and have you tell me in fifty years that I only said it the first time because you were crying. But Adalind, I choose you. Every day. I choose Kelly and Diana, and I choose us. I’m not going anywhere. That’s a promise.”

They sit like that for a long time. A tangle of limbs and tears and whispered nothings that rises and falls until they’re both worn out and calm again. It’s not just Eve they’re exorcising tonight, Adalind realizes. It’s the stress they’ve been under for nearly six years. It’s the death they’ve seen, and the people they’ve killed, and the prices they’ve paid—together and alone—all worth it, if it brought them together, but all requiring a reckoning, too.

Eventually, Adalind stops crying. She never cried before she met Nick. She was busy being the perfect everything for everyone. The lawyer, the witch, the daughter. All important, valuable pieces of her identity, but also only fragments of who she ultimately wants to be. A whole person who loves and laughs and cries and feels everything—the good and the bad. A whole person who loves another whole person, even if he is a killer neat-freak most of the time.

“I love you,” she says when she can speak again. He opens his mouth to respond, but she shakes her head and gives him a weak smile. “You’re right. Don’t say it now. Not like this.”

“Okay,” he says, leaning in to kiss her forehead. “Okay.”

“Just—”

“Yeah?”

Adalind takes a deep breath—in through the nose, out through the mouth—and closes her eyes—looking in—finding that strength in her heart—drawing it up.

“I need you to tell me something,” she says, opening her eyes again. He’s smiling down at her, eyes soft and warm.

“Anything,” he says.

“Are you sure? About us? About doing this together for the foreseeable future? Living together—raising the kids—being together—the whole thing. Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” he says, stroking her hair now, brushing her cheek. “It’s the only thing I’m sure about.”

“Okay,” she says. “How can I be sure?”

“Of me?”

“Of us. I mean, we’re an accident, right? No one puts a hexenbiest and a Grimm together. Not on purpose. You didn’t want to be with me, when this started. We certainly didn’t plan to have a baby together. I feel like I’ve tricked you into this whole thing, and you’re just too polite to tell me it’s all been one huge mistake.”

"It hasn’t been a mistake,” he says. “Nothing about what we have feels like a mistake to me. And I don’t think it’s accidental. Sometimes I think it’s fate. And as for not wanting to be with you at the start or planning Kelly, to be fair, you never asked me."

"I'm sorry,” she says. “I know it was wrong. I'm still so sorry—"

"No, Adalind, not that. We've talked about that. For me—for us—it's okay between us right now. That hasn’t changed."

"Okay. Okay. I'm still sorry."

"I'm sorry, too,” he says. “For a lot of things. Chief among which is not realizing that you were someone very special the first day we met."

Adalind laughs at that. A rough little chuckle that surprises her in the midst of all this emotional reckoning.

“Nick, I was evil the first day we met."

"No, you weren't,” he says. His grin is luminary. It takes her right back to that day in the sunlight, watching a young, carefree Nick just...glow. “You were a well-dressed, high-powered attorney with her whole career ahead of her until I turned up and ruined your life. And outside of that jewelry shop—even with a ring for someone else burning a hole in my pocket—I thought you were the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen."

"Oh,” she says. “I thought you were pretty cute, too, for a cop."

"Maybe you should have asked me out. Maybe I would have said yes."

"You wouldn't have. You never would have left Juliette."

"Maybe not,” he says, “but maybe… Maybe I would have realized then—that you were the one for me. Hank said something to me, you know. Right before you walked out of that coffee shop."

"Yeah?” Adalind wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, catching the last few stray tears. “What did he say?"

Nick ducks his head closer—leaning in—speaking softly. "He said I was a happily ever after kind of guy."

"Like in a fairytale?"

"Yeah,” he says, still smiling. ”Only the thing is—I don't think Juliette ever was my happily ever after girl."

"No?"

"No. I think she needed to be someone else entirely, even then. We both had to grow up, and we couldn't do that together. I wasn't her knight in shining armor, and she wasn't my princess in a tower, and every time we tried too hard to make that happen, it just went spectacularly wrong."

"You're not a knight in shining armor," Adalind says, and his smile dims a little. His shoulders slump.

"I know," he says, and his voice almost cracks.

"I mean what good would that be for nighttime camouflage?” She’s grinning at him now. Teasing him with all the love she has. “You're my knight in dark jeans and scrubby canvas, and don't you dare forget it."

"See, you're funny.” he says, laughing a little. Leaning down for a kiss. “I definitely would have wanted to go out with you.”

***

The whole team shows up the next morning. Hank and Wu come bearing coffee and muffins. Monroe and Rosalee turn up with Eve in tow. It’s still weird to have Eve at the loft, but it’s better now. Adalind looks at her for the first time in weeks and sees Eve—not the ghost of Juliette. They’re the same person, of course, but Eve is the witch. The bad bitch. She’s got troubles, but she’s got the power to face them. Adalind respects that a lot.

So after a stilted breakfast in which Monroe gets snobby about the coffee, and Eve barely picks at her muffin, they all crowd into the bathroom and look at the mirror where Nick and Eve saw the skull in the void.

“Maybe it’s after Nick, too?” Rosalee asks.

“That makes sense,” Monroe says, swept along on the thought. “I mean Nick and Eve are pretty deeply connected.”

There’s an awkward beat while that sinks in, and then Monroe is babbling, trying to fix it.

“I mean, you know, they were,” he says.

 _It's always going to be like this_ , Adalind thinks. _It’s always going to be weird. We’re all weirdos, and we’re all family, so it’s just going to be a little weird sometimes._

She’s surprisingly okay with that today.

And that’s the moment when Diana chooses to enter stage center and give them all a chilling premonition of what’s to come through what she calls the ‘hole in the mirror.’ From the other place.

 _Well_ , Adalind thinks, looking up at Diana in her nightgown speaking like an ancient prophetess, _I guess weird starts at home._

***

After that, they cover all the mirrors. Adalind gives up on styling her hair, and Nick commits to the stubble once she points out whatever they’re dealing with might not be frightened away by a Grimm.

He’s out on a case all day, but when he comes home he looks wiped.

“I fought a tree today,” he tells her, sinking into the pillows arranged against the headboard with a glass of red wine for her and beer for himself. Diana’s sleeping in the living room tonight, so sitting up in bed is as private as it gets. “I’m not exactly sure I was on the right side of that fight.”

“Ooo,” she says, taking a sip that reminds her of blackberries and spices and all that other bullshit Monroe would probably be able to list just from one sniff. “Moral complexity. I like that in a Grimm.”

Nick huffs out a laugh. “I know,” he says. “You used to get so mad.”

Adalind snuggles into his side, and he wraps an arm around her shoulders. Pulling her in. Kissing her hair.

“You were such a baby,” she says. “So black and white, so clean shaven. I just wanted to mess you up.”

“You succeeded,” he says. “Thank god.”

“Mmmm.” She hums a little, kissing the stubble on his chin. “And you gave me a moral compass. Something to help sort out all this grey we’re living with.”

“I guess we needed each other,” he says.

“Always,” Adalind says.

“Can we talk about Diana?”

Nick’s tone is careful. Perfectly calibrated to be non-confrontational. Adalind sighs. This conversation is way overdue.

“Yes,” she says. “Do you want to start with how you feel about being a step-father or how my daughter is linked to whatever the hell is going on with Eve?”

Nick sighs and hugs her closer. “Both,” he says, “but mostly, I want to ask if she’s okay? She must be pretty scared, knowing more than we do about this stuff but not being able to express it in a way that we really understand. That’s a lot to ask of a little kid.”

Adalind pulls back and looks at Nick, feeling her eyes start to get wet.

“You mean that, don’t you? You’re really worried about her?”

“Of course I’m worried about her,” Nick says. “She’s our kid, and she’s in the middle of something that seems pretty scary. She’s always asleep when I get in, and I’m worried I don’t see her enough to be useful to her at all, but I care about her, and I want her to know that we’ve both got her back on this.”

 _Our kid_ , Adalind thinks. _He said **our** kid._

“I love you,” she says, and he smiles at her like a sunrise.

***

A couple of nights later, Eve shows up to ask for Catherine Schade’s hexenbiest books, and Adalind hands them over with a growing sense of unease. As soon as Nick gets home, she sends him back out to talk to Eve.

 _It’s funny_ , she thinks. All this time angsting over Nick and Eve, and now she’s asking him to referee. But who else is going to do it? Adalind doesn’t exactly have a leg to stand on when it comes to telling another hexenbiest that there are lines that should not be crossed. Especially because crossing them and dealing with the consequences has brought her and Nick here, exactly where she wants to be.

But when Eve calls to ask about blood magic, Adalind worries that even Nick won’t be able to talk Eve off of this cliff. Blood magic is not Adalind’s specialty subject—she’d so much rather blow shit up than bleed on it—but Eve is clearly taking a nose dive into her mother’s books, and Adalind remembers what her mother was like after a long session with her grimoires. It’s not that the books are evil—magic doesn’t work like that—it’s that knowledge is power, and getting too in your head about it can send you into a power spike you can’t escape.

Adalind prefers to be much more utilitarian about it. Need a spell, look it up. Digging up spells you haven’t found a need for yet is just temptation, because you’ll want to try it. Of course you will, it’s there, ready to be used. Ready to change the world, and who doesn’t want to change the world?

It’s just changing it for the better that’s the tricky bit, and no one person’s definition of better can ever really be trusted. Even Nick likes to decide “better” by committee.

So talking to Eve about blood magic is not confidence inspiring, and talking to Sean about Diana’s drawings of the symbols from the cloth is terrifying.

She’s already antsy by the time Nick gets home, and that’s before he opens his mouth and says:

“Today I met a Gevatter Tod.”

“Oh my god,” Adalind says, all thoughts of Eve, Sean or Diana temporarily derailed. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“No,” he says. “He was very helpful. There was a Drang-Zorn with dementia. He killed two people while confused and woged. His wife was heartbroken, and the Gevatter Tod helped him move on.”

“That’s horrible,” Adalind says. “His poor wife.”

“His poor victims,” Nick says. “Poor him. What a nightmare.”

“Yeah.”

“Do hexenbiests get dementia?” Nick asks, leaning against the barn door of the bedroom, looking at Adalind where she’s sitting up in bed. “Is this something we need to talk about?”

Adalind smiles, sadly. “We don’t get dementia,” she says. “Something to do with the way we’re made, I guess. But we can start to cackle.”

“What does that mean?”

“That’s what Terry Pratchett calls it,” she says. “Diana’s starting to read his witch novels. He means that isolated witches—witches left on their own, away from other people—have a tendency to lose themselves a bit. His witches are fictional—much more morally sound—but hexenbiests’ moral compasses are already a bit wonky. Left on our own, they can get pretty bent. Gingerbread houses come to mind. Cursed spinning wheels. Getting really into some spiteful, hurtful stuff—not for profit or power, but because it’s fun, in some deeply personal, twisted way.”

“So what you’re saying is we wouldn’t need a Gevatter Tod so much as an axe, if things get really bad in fifty years.”

“Pretty much,” Adalind says with a shrug. There’s no sense worrying about it now. “If I start cackling, you and Kelly are going to have to take me out. Bury me somewhere close, but hidden, so the kids can make a suppressant potion out of me later, if they need to.”

“Ugh,” Nick says, pushing off the door and coming to kiss her. “Okay, so let’s try not to let that happen, please.”

“Of course,” she says, pulling him down to sit beside her on the bed, face to face. “That’s why I have you.”

“Do we know what happens to old Grimms, by any chance?” Nick asks.

“Not a clue,” Adalind says. “Not a lot of data out there. I’ll risk it, though. We’ll write the book, make a killing.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Nick says, but he is smiling. So is Adalind. It’s a little messed up, but talking about elder care feels lovely. Like they’re planning to grow old together. Like they both plan to be there when the other goes senile. It’s kind of nice.

Talking more about Sean and Diana is not so nice. Adalind is happy to let Nick deal with Sean. The last time she dealt with Sean without him, she had to go live with the dick, so she’s not excited about repeating that mistake. That said, once Eve goes through the mirror, things start to look a little different.

“I’m not losing you,” Nick says, like losing him is any better, and then he goes through the mirror without her, and Adalind thinks, _fucking_ _heroes_. And then, _well, I guess I’m in charge now._

She doesn’t relish it the way she might have before. She has a natural appreciation for a good power vacuum, but this one gives her no joy. She’d much rather have Nick and Eve here in Monroe and Rosalee’s living room, making it awkward as usual. But without him, Nick’s merry band needs someone to look to, and Adalind is that someone.

“We need to talk to Sean,” Adalind says. “If he has a friend who might be able to help us, then we need to find out who that friend is. And if that means showing him the tunnel—”

“We show Renard the tunnel,” Rosalee says, in a tone that brooks no further argument, and Adalind suddenly understands something new about how the team works. Monroe is the skeptic. He makes Nick consider and reconsider every move. Rosalee is the force behind him—the woman with the books and the potions and the will to see them through. Adalind is the witch—the lawyer. The person thinking two steps ahead, and the one looking three steps behind. The one who knows what she wants and is going to get it, if she has to bust through that mirror herself and kick Nick and Eve’s ass back into their world.

"Nick would not like this one bit,” Monroe says, in one last ditch effort to forestall the inevitable.

"Nick isn't here,” Adalind says. “Trust me, I would love to make this his problem. But if he's going to go running off into danger, he doesn't get to get pissy when I problem solve without him. Them's the breaks."

They decamp to the loft and call Hank and Wu before making the call to Sean. Hank is just as anxious to get Nick back, and Adalind feels a kinship with him in this. Monroe is Nick’s best friend, but Hank is Nick’s partner, like Adalind, and there’s something about that kind of a relationship that puts Hank’s worry in the same register as Adalind’s. Nick’s their guy—for better or for worse—and they won’t be getting any sleep without him.

Still, no one is particularly happy about involving Sean.

“He doesn’t have a great track record for helping anyone but himself,” Wu says, which is a pretty diplomatic way of saying Sean’s an opportunistic narcissist, but they all knew that.

“Yeah, what are we telling him exactly?” Monroe asks.

“Whatever he wants to know,” Adalind says, holding the line. “We’re out of options.”

“And who’s going down in the tunnel with him?” Hank asks.

“Well Diana has to go down with me, but I don’t want to be down there alone with Renard.”

“You won’t be,” Hank says, and Adalind gets a glimpse of a future where Nick doesn’t come home, but uncle Hank keeps an eye on her and Kelly like they’re his own family. It’s not a happy thought, but it is a reassuring one.

“I’m going, too,” Monroe says, and Adalind feels warm for the first time since Nick stepped through the mirror. Even without Nick, she is not alone. She has friends—family—people who are going to help her face this crisis and every crisis to come because they love Nick, and they care about her, and they are goddamn heroes, every single one.

Dealing with Sean turns out to be much less dramatic than anticipated. It sort of makes sense—there’s no power to grab when you’re staring down the barrel of the apocalypse. The only play is saving the world and living to grab power another day.

They look at the tunnel and talk to Sean’s friend, who tells them that Diana is destined to be the bride of Satan, and Adalind is way too young to be Satan’s mother-in-law, so they have to stop this thing fast.

Still, it’s sort of anti-climatic when they get back to Monroe and Rosalee’s, and she finally argues everyone into agreeing that she should go through the mirror, only to have Diana just open it and pull Nick and Eve back through, along with a staff that radiates power.

It’s more complicated than that. Adalind can see how emotional Nick is about seeing them all again. He’s crying and laughing and kissing her and hugging everyone, including the kids, and it doesn’t take a hexenbiest to tell that something life changing has happened since she saw him last. She’s not wearing Bonaparte’s ring anymore, either, and that’s just icing on the cake.

She takes Nick home eventually, once he’s done hugging everyone and stumbling over explanations that make no sense. They’re all a little sleep deprived, but Nick looks like he’s running on days without it, so Adalind thanks everyone and shepherds Nick and Diana to the car.

“I’m driving,” she says. “You’re still shaking.”

“I’m so happy,” Nick says, nodding off in the passenger seat. “Adalind, god, I’m so happy to be home.”

He barely wakes up when they get to the loft, but Diana slides in under one of his arms and helps him make it into the elevator and upstairs while Adalind trails behind with Kelly in his car seat. She’s never seen Diana touch Nick before tonight. There’s always been a distance between them—a forcefield fueled by the natural wariness between step-kid and step-dad, nevermind a Grimm and the most powerful hexenbiest in the world.

That wariness is gone now. There’s a sense of comradeship between them. A secret about the end of the world and its salvation that only the two of them will ever really understand. Adalind follows them both to the bedroom, where Nick climbs into bed fully clothed, and Diana pulls the covers up like she’s tucking him in.

“Night, Nick,” Diana says, leaning in to kiss his cheek.

“Night, kiddo,” he mumbles back, and Adalind wonders if her heart has ever felt this full.

***

That night Adalind dreams of the end of the world. One where Nick tells her he loves her, and they all die, and Nick almost, almost gives up. She wakes up clutching her throat, feeling the wound there that never was, and then she realizes that Nick has her completely pinned underneath his dead weight on the bed with his head resting on her chest.

“I lost you,” he mutters, more than half asleep. “Don’t you dare die on me again.”

Adalind huffs and grins, lowering her hands to stroke his hair where it tickles her chin.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are at the end! Thank you all so much for reading, commenting, kudoing, and coming with me on this adventure. This story is the longest thing I've ever written, and the most personally rewarding. Thank you again for reading!

_Once upon a time..._

***

“Gently,” Adalind says to Diana. “You have to be really, really gentle with it, or it’ll explode.”

Diana rolls her eyes at her mother. She’s the most powerful girl in the world—she can put toothpaste on her toothbrush without supervision, thank you very much.

Adalind hides a grin. She remembers giving her mother that same look. The _do-you-think-I-was-born-yesterday_ look that used to get her a spanking. Of course in Diana’s case, she very nearly was born yesterday, so there’s that. Adalind really tries not to think about that.

“I know,” Adalind says. “It seems silly, but getting toothpaste to come out of the tube gently is about really fine magic control. It’s harder than it looks.”

Diana sighs and goes for it. Lifting the toothpaste tube with her mind, unscrewing the cap, and tipping it over the brush in her hand—squeezing with her magic.

It explodes—all over her new shirt and the brush and the floor and the mirror and… Adalind looks at the ceiling. Yes, it’s up there, too.

_Harder than it looks_ , she thinks. _Just like motherhood._

“You all right?” she asks. “Did any get in your eyes?”

“No,” Diana says, still staring down at the tube that isn’t anymore. “Are we sure the toothpaste isn’t evil? I think we should behead it, just to make sure.”

“That’s my girl,” Nick says on his way past the bathroom with a fussy Kelly in his arms. “When in doubt, behead the thing.”

Adalind laughs. “It’s toothpaste, Nick.”

“Yeah?” He pokes his head in the bathroom and takes in Diana and the surrounding explosion.

“Definitely evil,” he says. “Good work, Diana.”

Diana grins at him, and Adalind feels that warmth again. The one that comes from loving these people who also love each other and her and Kelly. The one that comes from finally finding a family together, somehow.

There’s a new vibe in the loft these days. Nick and Diana have their own jokes together now, and she’ll only eat Nick’s pancakes because only Nick knows how to make them the way Diana likes them, apparently. Adalind might be jealous of the connection between them if it wasn’t so cute to watch.

It’s also helping her to imagine a new kind of life for all of them. One where they’re not just living in crisis mode, and the kids don’t need her full attention the way they have this past year. A life where she gets to leave the house a lot more often, and maybe even get back to figuring out what she wants to do with her career.

Adalind hasn’t had a regular job since she met Nick, and she misses it. She misses walking into a courtroom and owning it. She misses getting coffee with a colleague and arguing about how they want to dissect a case. Sometimes she even misses sitting across from Nick at an interrogation table and taunting him. Just a little.

So she needs a job, and that means Diana needs to go to school. The options for that are not particularly vast. There are hexenbiest academies in the world, but they are extremely exclusive. You have to know someone who knows someone to find them, and you have to be sponsored by an alum. There’s a reason most hexenbiests get homeschooled.

Adalind remembers homeschooling with her mother. She’s not going to make that mistake with Diana. And there is something to be said for socialization. Diana’s been operating without friends her own age for way too long.

Luckily, Sean’s mother is famous in the hexenbiest world. If anyone can get Diana into school, it will be Elizabeth. The trick is getting a hold of her, which requires a black candle and a pin drop of Diana’s blood at the full moon. When Elizabeth shows up in the candle flame, Adalind feels the kind of satisfaction she hasn’t been able to enjoy with a spell since she was cursing Nick every other week.

“Adalind Schade,” Elizabeth says, lovely, accented vowels flowing off her tongue like wine. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Diana needs a school,” Adalind says in hushed tones. Nick’s still out on a case, but Diana is sleeping nearby. “I was wondering if you might be able to help?”

“Of course. Anything for my darling granddaughter. She has been returned to you, then, I take it?”

“It’s a long story,” Adalind says. “But yes, she’s with me and Nick and Sean. Give us a call if you’re ever in Portland. You are her grandmother, and she’s already lost two. I’m sure she’d love to meet you.”

“Of course,” Elizabeth says, and Adalind knows that she’ll never call again. Even this candle trick might not work the next time, so she’d better make the most of this conversation.

“While I have you,” she says, “could I ask—the spell you did for Nick and Juliette—the reversal spell that gave Nick his powers back and turned Juliette into a hexenbiest—did you know that all of this was going to happen?”

Elizabeth straightens in the flame and looks at Adalind with something like respect.

“Did I know that two ill-suited people with much greater potential would be better served apart rather than stuck together in perpetual gridlock while my granddaughter wandered the world without a family to raise her and her brother needed a father?”

Adalind blinks at the flame where Elizabeth is smiling like the most serene goddess she has ever seen.

“Yeah,” she says finally. “That.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Elizabeth says. “I’m not omniscient.”

“Right,” Adalind says, shaking herself. “Of course.”

“It did work out, though,” Elizabeth says, still smiling that terrifyingly calm smile. “Diana has the family she needs. She and her brother have an excellent mother and a very capable father figure. If I had planned it, I’d be very pleased.”

“Right,” Adalind says again. “Right.”

“I’ll put in a word at Pemberton, shall I? Lovely little place—a bit gothic, but in the best possible way. Not too far from Portland, so it could be a day school, just until she’s old enough and in control of her powers well enough to think about public school. I know the headmistress. She’s the perfect woman to help keep an eye on Diana—and she owes me a favor. She’ll be in touch.”

“Okay,” Adalind says, because it’s very clear that Elizabeth knows exactly what she’s doing, and then Elizabeth is gone. Adalind suspects they may never hear from her again.

When Nick gets home, Adalind is still sitting at the counter, staring at the candle flame that’s no longer there.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

Adalind lifts her head to look at him, standing in front of her across the kitchen island—scruffy and tired and hers—and she sends a little mental thank you note to Elizabeth Lascelles, the patron saint of hexenbiests with a questionable taste in men.

“I just talked to Sean’s mom,” she says. “She knows a good school for Diana.”

“That’s great,” Nick says.

“Yeah,” Adalind says. “I think it probably will be.”

***

And that’s what she has to tell herself when she sees the price tag for Pemberton. Sean barely bats an eye, but Adalind feels a little sick when she shows it to Nick.

“We’ll cover half,” he says, barely pausing while he adds broth to the risotto and keeps stirring it. They’ve really committed to learning how to cook rice lately.

“Are you sure?” Adalind asks. “Nick, this is a lot of money.”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he says, still stirring while he smiles at her over the stove. “Diana is important, and I don’t just mean to us. Diana has enough power in her little finger to rule the world if she wants to. And honestly, even if she doesn’t want to. So we’re not taking any chances on Renard controlling her education. We’re going halvies, and we’re going to be the first two calls anyone makes if Diana needs a parent to come get her at school.”

Adalind stares at him. He’s got a dish towel thrown over his shoulder like one of Kelly’s spit up cloths, and he’s stirring the pot with one hand while he adds the broth with the other, and he’s still smiling at her like he means it. Like he wants to invest in their daughter and their future together, and if that starts with a ridiculously expensive witch school outside of Portland, then that’s what he’s going to do.

“Thank you,” she says. “Really.”

“It’s no problem,” he says. He glances around the loft and then back to his risotto, which is looking completely delicious. But the loft is getting a little cramped these days, what with all of Kelly’s toys, and Diana’s school prep books, and Adalind’s growing collection of spell and law books.

“We’ll have to wait on a new house for a bit,” he says, tasting the rice. “We’ll manage, though. We haven’t killed each other yet.”

_This is love_ , she thinks. He’s never said it, but he doesn’t have to now. She knows it in every cell in her body. He loves her, and she loves him, and if that wasn’t enough, he also loves her daughter, and it really doesn’t get any better than this.

Except the loft, of course, which definitely needs an upgrade.

***

They had been looking at an old craftsman house down the road from Monroe and Rosalee’s before they got the bill for Diana’s school. The place probably should have given her flashbacks to Nick’s old house with Juliette, but standing in the cozy living room in front of the old brick fireplace, all Adalind had felt was warmth. It felt like home, and she doesn’t want to wait to buy it, not when she’s sitting on just enough money to cover the down payment.

That money is her safety net—her fuck you money—her escape plan for every relationship or alliance she's ever been in. But then she looks at Nick, who's got a drowsy Kelly in one arm and a riveted Diana pressed up under his arm on the other side. He’s reading them a story about good witches and bad witches and brains and courage and heart, and Adalind knows she’s not in Kansas anymore. It's time to buy a house in Oz, because this—this has to be forever.

“Are you telling me that you’ve always had enough money squirreled away to buy a house in Portland?” Nick asks later, when the kids are in bed. “And in two years of us living together, you never thought to mention it?”

“Well, I thought about it—”

“Not hard enough!” he says—yells really—but then he catches himself and takes a deep breath—in through his nose, out through his mouth—and looks at her with forced calm.

“Okay,’ he says, “why now?”

“Well, we need a new house now.”

Nick glowers. That’s the only word for the way his dark eyes pin hers.

“That’s it?” he asks. “It's just necessary now, and it wasn’t when you were on the run from Juliette and the Royals and the Resistance and god knows who else?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t?”

“Of course not,” she says, rolling her eyes because he doesn’t get it at all. “I had you.”

Nick just stares at her, eyes bugged out, taking deep breaths. His eyes fall closed, and his head droops while he pinches his nose with one hand and puts his other hand on his hip, as if all reason has failed him and now he’s considering prayer. It probably shouldn’t make her feel warm inside—that she’s the only one that can upset his applecart like this. It probably shouldn’t, but it really does.

“I love you,” she says, reaching for his face so he’ll open his eyes and see the love buried deep in hers. He reaches for her instinctively—even now—in the middle of what might be their most serious fight since they stopped trying to kill each other, and she reels him in, snuggling close, searching for his heartbeat next to hers.

“I’m so grateful you’ve taken care of us for two years,” she tells him, whispering in the space between them. “I showed up with just about nothing to offer you but a baby you didn’t ask for, and you have been the best partner and the best father Kelly or I could ever need. But you have to understand something about me—about the way I was raised. I didn’t have a dad. I didn’t have anyone I could rely on other than myself. My mother was very clear about that. I was raised to be alone in the world. I was raised to play the game—to barter my services for protection and power, and to do whatever I needed to do to survive.

“This money? It was my fuck-you money. It was my golden parachute if my protector got too dangerous—if the sex got too nauseating or if I finally ran into a problem I couldn’t fuck my way out of. Or if one day, I woke up and decided being a nobody in the back of beyond would be better than one more day of selling my body or my brain or my powers just to survive. It’s not enough to support me indefinitely. It’s enough to leave everything behind and start a new life if I have to. It would not have kept me and Kelly safe and sustained the way you have. It would not have reunited me with Diana. You haven’t just supported us with money—you’ve given us so much more. Your care, your energy, your power. You gave me back Diana, Nick. You gave me and our children a place to be safe and loved. You saved us—all of us—and now I want to invest in us, too. I want to give up my parachute for a better life with you.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, dark grey eyes searching hers with worry now, rather than ire. “You’re right—I didn’t understand. We don’t need the money—not if it’s at the cost of your safety. Not if you’re going to feel trapped with me—like you can’t leave if you want to. I never want you to feel like you have to keep me happy to survive.”

“Don’t I?” she asks, smiling a little, stroking his stubbled cheek. “If you’re not happy, then I’m not really happy, Nick. I’m no expert, but I think that might just be what love is.”

“There’s that,” he concedes, lips quirked up. “God knows if you’re not happy, I’m in danger.”

“I think the feeling is mutual. I think that’s okay. That we depend on each other—that we trust each other with our lives and our happiness. I think that’s what love is, Nick. I think this is it.”

“Yeah,” he says, leaning in for a kiss, soft and loving and perfect. “Yeah, I think it is.”

“And besides,” she says, grinning now, “we both know there will never be a problem between us that I can’t fuck my way out of.

“Very funny,” he says, trying for stern disapproval and missing by the glimmer of fire that comes into his eyes. It makes her want him even more.

“Should we try that now, do you think?”

He closes his eyes and sighs—another deep breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. She nips at his lower lip, just for the fun of it, and he pounces, picking her up to toss her on the bed.

“Fine,” he says, prowling towards her, grinning back at her, reaching for the hem of his t-shirt and pulling it off—finally—finally—getting just a naked as she wants him.

“This is a huge problem, Adalind,” he says, fingers working at his belt buckle, moving with such practiced grace she’s getting turned on just from watching. “It’s going to take awhile.”

***

Adalind is in the middle of packing the bedroom when Nick proposes.

“I love you,” he says finally, while she’s trying to figure out how to stuff all of their clothes into one large suitcase, so she looks up at him in distraction and just says: “Duh.”

“We’re moving in together again, again,” she says. “We just paid Diana’s school tuition for the year. If you didn’t love me before that check cleared, you’d be crazy.”

“You make me crazy.”

“You love my crazy.”

“Yes,” he says, pulling out a small ring box from his back pocket and opening it in front of her eyes. “I do. So marry me and drive me crazy for the rest of our lives.”

She’s crying too hard to see the ring, and Nick is at her side so quickly, she’s starting to wonder if he might actually have some magic, too, these days.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I did this wrong. I should have taken you to dinner or something. Something romantic.”

“This is romantic,” Adalind says, sniffing back tears. She can see the ring now. It’s a sapphire, not a cursed diamond. It’s perfect. “Packing for our new home together is very, very romantic.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes,” she says. “Now put the ring on my finger and kiss me, please.”

“Right,” Nick says, fumbling with the box and the ring to do just that. “Anything you want, Adalind. Anything at all.”

***

What she wants turns out to be a job at Portland’s central Legal Aid Bureau. Once they move and Diana starts school, Adalind finds herself with time to devote to this new area of her life.

The job isn’t entirely about her own redemption. She’s genuinely interested to see what wesen lawyering looks like outside of Evil, Inc. and working with the wesen community gives her an insight into the non-criminal wesen issues that their team has been more than a little myopic about. That’s perfectly understandable—they’ve all just been trying to survive for the past six years—but now that the world’s not ending, and Portland seems to be a no fly zone for the Royals, they finally have time to broaden their scope and think about what the wesen in their community need besides criminal investigation.

The list is long. They need help with their landlords, with the IRS, with custody disagreements, and immigration issues, and a whole host of other problems that Adalind never knew even existed. Or she did know, back in law school, but the intervening years of Royal intrigue pushed more pedestrian case law right out of her head. The breadth of focus she encounters at the Legal Aid Bureau is so overwhelming that she finds herself standing in front of the coffee machine on day three, waiting for it to brew just to get a moment of quiet before the next case comes in.

“It’s ugly in these trenches, isn’t it?” Gloria says. It’s phrased like a question, but it’s a blunt statement. Gloria has worked in legal aid for ten years. Gloria has survived two mayors, five DAs, and a system so broken only a madwoman would keep showing up every day, trying to slap a Band-Aid on the crumbling façade of the American legal system.

But Adalind has always been a little mad, and she came here for a reason. Murder isn’t the only crime worth fighting. Justice comes in many forms.

“It is ugly,” Adalind says, thinking of her last client. The woman with a black eye and a baby and nowhere to run. Another mother port-less in Portland, looking for a way out of the storm.

“But I want to help,” Adalind says, meeting Gloria’s all too knowing eyes, “so I’m going to. Coffee?”

“Fuck yes,” Gloria says. “No sugar, please.”

A few weeks later, Adalind thinks she must have seen it all by now. She’s helping a client with yet another landlord dispute. Eviction law is a real pain, but it’s beginning to be a bit of a specialty for her. She’s still surprised, though, when she looks up from the lease to find her client woged.

He’s an eisbiber, and it turns out that Bud sent him.

“He said you were the best,” her client says. “He says you know the Grimm.”

Adalind cocks her head. Poor Bud is going to have a heart attack when Nick tells him not to advertise his connection to Adalind. Not that Nick doesn’t want people to know she’s his fiancé, he’s just a little overprotective about strangers knowing his weak points these days. As if Adalind and Diana couldn’t wipe out half of Portland if they put their minds to it.

Still, it’s nice to know Bud has faith in her. It makes her think of pie and warm, fuzzy socks.

"Should we call the Grimm?" her client asks, face human again.

"Why?" she asks. "Did you murder someone?"

"No!"

"Then how is he going to help?"

"He could—I don't know—scare them?"

Adalind snorts, imagining Nick's face if she were to ask him to be her muscle in a tenancy dispute. He'd do it—of course he would—but he'd look at her the way he looks at Bud—exasperated fondness and just a smidge of _Really?_ —and she's not ready to give up the hot look he's been giving her lately. The one that tells her he thinks she runs his world.

"That won't be necessary," Adalind says. "I'm plenty scary, all on my own.”

She grins at her client then, and he gulps. He doesn't bring up the Grimm again.

***

The wedding is a small affair. Eve declines the invitation, but the rest of the team joins them at city hall for the vows, and even Gloria comes along with biodegradable confetti and some flowers for the bride. The judge who marries them recognizes Adalind from her Evil, Inc. days.

“Why, Ms. Schade,” he says, giving her an eye over his pez-nez. “I never thought I’d see the day you married the law rather than thwarted it.”

Nick looks like he’s ready to punch the guy, but Adalind just laughs. She’ll be in court with him in another week or two. No point in getting off on the wrong foot.

“I’ve grown,” she says. “Just enough.”

Later it’s just the family for dinner at the new house. Kelly and Diana, Monroe and Rosalee—seven months pregnant and completely radiant—Hank and Wu and Trubel, in from her latest adventure in Mexico and excited to tell them all about the ancient Mayan wesen she ran into.

“I’m going to start my own collection of Grimm books,” she says. “Monroe, Rosalee, do you have shelf space in the spice shop for me?”

“Of course,” Monroe says. “We’ll take whatever you’ve got.”

Much later, after they've hugged all of their friends goodbye and made sure the kids brushed their teeth, Adalind finally gets Kelly to sleep in his new big boy bed and shuffles off to bed herself.

Nick is already asleep when she gets there, the bastard. Diana’s well on her way to mastering the toothpaste, and she must have fallen asleep easily, which wasn't even fair given the amount of cake Adalind let her sneak throughout the celebration. Some people just have all the luck. Although he is her husband now, which means that half his dumb luck should be hers now, too.

_Husband_. It's so new and yet not. Nick's her husband now. They have a toddler together, and Diana. _He's raising Diana with her_. Try telling that story to the witch wailing in the street four years ago. See how far that takes you.

_All the way to his bed_ , she thinks, slipping off her dress at last, letting it pool at her feet. Her husband can pick it up tomorrow. _Husband._ Her bare feet scrunch into the rug as she pads to her side of the bed that they share. They've shared a bed ever since they moved into the loft, back when every shadow scared her until he moved into her bed and chased them all away.

What a lucky witch she is.

Under the covers his chest is bare. He must be very tired if he didn't bother putting on a t-shirt in case the kids turn up bedside at 3am again. _Poor Grimm_ , she thinks, kissing her way down his chest. She'll have to wake him up.

His hand in her hair sometime later tells her he's awake. He draws her back up his chest, one hand tender against the back of her neck, the other taking a greedy swipe down her back to get her right where he wants her, sprawled against his chest, peering down at him through the fall of her silvery, moonlit hair.

"I love you," he says, voice dark and deep in the space between their noses. "Let me love you."

It's not even a question. It doesn’t take much to slide together. Two pieces of a puzzle that just fit, just like magic.

After, he puts on a t-shirt and boxers, throwing her an old, worn pajama shirt that's been a favorite since she was nursing Kelly. She pulls it over her head, and when her head pops out of the collar he sighs with his eyes still on her breasts like he misses them.

"I can't wait until they're both teenagers, and they don't want to talk to us at all, much less in the middle of the night."

"No you don't," she says with a laugh. "You want them to be little forever and always be our babies, and so do I."

"Yeah," he says, crawling into bed and pulling her into him to spoon. "But sleeping with you naked will be a really great consolation."

"Something to look forward to, then."

"Mmmm." He's already starting to fall back to sleep when he kisses her hair softly one more time. "You are my happily ever after girl."

* * *

_Once upon a time, there was a young witch who met a young Grimm._   
_He wasn’t a prince, and she wasn’t a princess, and they loved each other after all..._


End file.
